


Miss Me In Your Bones

by softnoirr



Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Breaking Up & Making Up, F/F, Slow Burn, they're exes so theres that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:08:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 58,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26246203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softnoirr/pseuds/softnoirr
Summary: Christen hadn’t ever meant to get divorced. That had never been in the plan. They were meant to live in the suburbs by now. Close to a train line and a shopping complex but with parks they could take the dogs to on weekends. There was meant to be a nice office with leather chairs and too bright art on the walls, forever rotating as Tobin came up with new things to hang. She would keep fresh flowers on her desk and answer calls with ‘Christen Heath, associate at law, may I ask who is calling?’, like something out of a childhood fantasy.Instead, she was 32 and a divorcée. Her engagement ring sat buried in the bottom compartment of a jewellery box. She’d left her wedding band in the apartment in Portland, propped next to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, on top of the thick envelope of half signed divorce papers with a note that just said "all the best."Or; Christen and Tobin have been divorced for five years. They reunite over pre-made supermarket salad. It doesn't exactly fit Christen's best laid plans.
Relationships: Tobin Heath/Christen Press
Comments: 330
Kudos: 832





	1. Grocery lists (that just said you you you you)

**Author's Note:**

> Things I had to research for this:  
> \- How much does a pint of Ben and Jerry's cost in the US?   
> \- What is 16oz in metric?  
> \- Is 16oz a lot of ice-cream  
> \- Do Americans have Ben and Jerry's? 
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not live in Los Angeles, nor have I ever been there. I am still electing to use it as a plot device. I also do not use USD or know what the conversion rate for ice-cream is. I am relying on the internet, if it's wildly inaccurate please feel free to laugh at me in the comments for it. 
> 
> The title of this chapter is from Christopher Citro's poem "Our Beautiful Life When Its Filled With Shrieks." The title of this fic is from 'my tears ricochet' by Taylor Swift.

Christen wasn’t in love with her ex, or anything. It had taken five years and thousands of dollars of therapy to be able to say it definitively, but she wasn’t. There were plenty of people that would claim she was. Megan liked to sigh dramatically about the star crossed love affair that was the ancient ruins of her former relationship. It was largely in jest, but it still made Christen feel a little like white wine wasn’t strong enough to get through their monthly dinners. Particularly given that Pinoe liked to drink Sangria when they caught up, and it always got her in the mood to talk about love, and there wasn’t much going on for Christen in that department, so it all fell into discussion of Tobin. But Christen didn’t love her. Not like that. 

It was just, well, Christen hadn’t ever meant to get divorced. That had never been in the plan. They were meant to live in the suburbs by now. Close to a train line and a shopping complex but with parks they could take the dogs to on weekends. There was meant to be a nice office with leather chairs and too bright art on the walls, forever rotating as Tobin came up with new things to hang. She would keep fresh flowers on her desk and answer calls with ‘Christen Heath, may i ask who is calling?’ They’d go to Christen’s monthly dinners with Pinoe and Ashlyn and Ali together when Tobin was in town, and she’d sigh prettily when she had to go alone because she wasn’t. They wouldn’t have had kids yet, but a dog or two probably, and she was going to go to work in the city most days, but would have the option to stay and work from home when she needed or wanted to. Kids would have been in the works around now. A genuine process beginning when Christen turned 30 and Tobin was in the last years of her career. The suburbs were the first step in that. The path had been very clearly drawn. Then, just as swiftly, cut short. 

She’d met Tobin in college, already a hotshot in the midst of a stupid degree she’d never be able to do anything with, one that everyone, including Tobin, knew she didn’t need. She’d always been a little wonderstruck. Christen was pre law with a talent for soccer but lacking the single minded insanity the players on scholarships or chasing a league spot seemed to have over it. Tobin was like a burst of colour across her perfectly ordered life, and she’d been unable to resist the mess it made. She had been there when Tobin won an Olympic medal, and then when she lost a World Cup, and then when she won another medal. She was there when she won a league title, when she was a National Champion, and when she was injured and couldn’t play a season. They were long distance and in each other's pockets. Tobin missed work presentations and birthdays and the celebration of Christen passing the bar. Christen had lived their lives, Tobin splayed out without a care beside her, longing and persisting and manifesting the timeline they were going to follow.

None of it ever came to fruition. Instead, she was 32 and a divorcée. Her engagement ring sat buried in the bottom compartment of a jewellery box. She’d left her wedding band in the apartment in Portland, propped next to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, on top of the thick envelope of half signed divorce papers. The ones Christen colleague had drafted as a favour, handing them to her with a sticky note saying "all the best" attached.

There had been no way in hell Christen was staying in that city. It was Tobin’s. She littered billboards and murals. Her smile shone down from every angle. Christen would never have been able to stomach driving past Providence and the mausoleum of her failure every day for the rest of her life. She’d hightailed it to Barcelona for a summer, and then to Sweden, and then eventually LA. She liked routine, but she was also fairly insistent that things had to be right before she would incorporate them into her life. Perhaps that was where she’d gone wrong with Tobin.

Utah was never an option, too foregin, too close to the life she was walking away from, even if she had spent a year there post grad. She considered New York, with its stone steps and big dreams and thousand rom coms about starting over again, but she couldn’t stomach the loneliness. So she found herself back in LA, where there were good jobs and the beach she’d grown up near and her family's house close enough to visit on bad days, though she hadn’t quite managed a true trip home since the divorce. It was still lonely, sometimes; a lot of the time. She had friends, a woman named Jesse she worked with and who liked football and Christen enough to go with her to an LAFC game. Pinoe was elbow deep in her political ambitions, but they still caught up for dinner and called when they had the chance, if not much else. Ashlyn and Ali were around more, but something about the two of them, with their relationship which had burnt brighter and lasted far longer than hers, was unsettling. Ali had been her bridesmaid, and now she tried to set her up with Ashlyn’s work friends. People that didn’t know anything about her life before, like Jesse, were easier. 

She bought a house near the beach and pot plants lining the desk, only a fifteen minute drive from the firm she’d taken a job at. It was all white walls and glass furniture covered in flowers. She’d kept only one painting when she left Portland, a big swirly blue thing she’d hung in the guest room when she found it in her storage locker, because it felt like the beach, and something seemed wrong about throwing away art. Even if it did have a tiny ‘T.H’ printed in the corner. It wasn’t like her ex would’ve noticed it was missing. She’d likely hardly noticed Christen was missing. 

She didn’t keep track of Tobin. She knew what she couldn’t avoid. Which was to say, whatever the sports page of the paper made known and whatever her co-workers talked idly about when they wanted something lighter than whatever case they were managing that was crushing their soul day by day. A few of them had gone to a national team game when they were in town. They’d offered Christen a ticket, but she’d declined almost as soon as they had finished asking. The idea of sitting in a crowd watching Tobin the way everyone else did, risking the possibility of meeting her eye. Well, it was as romantic and wistful as it was nauseating and never allowed into the realm of possibility. 

Every now and again she allowed herself to watch a game on TV and pretend her chest didn’t twinge at the sight of the Heath jersey patrolling the outer edge. Pretended to forget about the now outdated jersey that bore the same name and number buried deep in a chest of drawers in her spare room. There were some things that weren’t worth revisiting, and she reminded herself every time she indulged in the habit that Tobin and the last name they’d attempted to share for a brief, blinding moment in what she intended to be a long and clear life was one of them.

It had taken a long time for her stories to stop being ‘oh Tobin said this’ or ‘Tobin used to think that’. It had taken even longer for her to become a passing ‘my ex’ in conversations that couldn’t avoid the past or the nine years of her life when Tobin had been a fairly undeniable presence. Christen hadn’t even realised how much of herself had become tied to her relationship before she left. How little she spoke about herself as a single being. Her single friends had teased her, but then her friends had become almost entirely her colleagues and Tobin’s teammates, and then she had woken up one day with puffy eyes and a relationship on the line and realised there was nobody left in her life she could call whos alliance wasn’t clearly on the other side of the relationship. 

She wasn’t prepared to go back to the good old days. They hadn’t been that good for her, or so her therapist had coaxed the logical side into believing. They’d been a lot of ‘soon’ and ‘later’ and ‘one day’ and she’d gotten older and older and had eventually let everything hit the ground and shatter so she could try and sweep it up and get herself off the floor. She wasn’t prepared to let Tobin into her life again. Even as a memory. Stevie Nicks had been right, time made you bolder, a lyric Christen had sung on repeat as she drove out of Portland with all her worldly possessions. 

They shouldn’t have gotten married. She hadn’t meant to be divorced, but she hadn’t really meant to be married either. That had been a last minute incorporation to her plans. Their whole relationship had been something of a diversion. Tobin went with the flow, and Christen had tried desperately to keep up with her, right up until she’d resented her for how far off course the current had taken them and broken the damn, only for Tobin to keep swimming as if she hadn’t realised Christen had even been there.

She doesn’t hate herself the way she did at 27. Doesn’t feel the need to indulge in her masochistic tendencies when it comes to Tobin. Doesn’t need to scroll through her social media, hover over the little line that says “follows you” and wonder when it’s going to go away. Doesn’t text her when she wins a game and wait for hours and hours wondering if she’ll get a “thx :)” that leaves her feeling hollow or a ‘read’ receipt that leaves her numb below the irritation. 

Things were good. She and Jesse ate lunch in the break room together, shared a bottle of wine on days when one of them was overworked or sick of the client of the hour. Sometimes she went to dinner parties or drank bad beer and laughed with some of their friends and friends of friends. She clutched the arm of whatever tall guy wanted to condescendingly explain baseball to her before shrugging off the revelation she was into women and knew the sport pretty fucking well, thanks, as Jesse laughed. She was good at her job. Had her own office with tacky staplers and an expensive photo frame with a picture from four Christmases ago of her and her Mum, her skin still tanned from Spain and her Mother’s hold around her tight with concern, the last Christmas they’d had before she passed. She didn’t think about Tobin. She slept with a few girls she knew now and again. One of them claimed she was ‘mindfully single’, and one of them was just down for a good time and breakfast the next day on the porch which led down to the beach and had bumped up the value of Christen’s house by at least 70%. 

Her days were empty and passing, with solid work and cold floorboards and meaningless sex. She likes her friends, but they don’t know very much about her. She still sees her family, but she only replies to about half of her sisters text messages, and she can’t stomach the sad look her Dad gives her when he tries to pry into her romantic life. Can’t handle the way everyone seems to be holding their breath for her to declare the divorce was all one big joke and she’s actually managed adulthood and relationships perfectly afterall. That she hasn’t let any of them down as considerably as current circumstances would lead one to believe. She only thought about Tobin when she was almost asleep and feeling unjustifiably lonely. Christen cares about herself too much to worry about what Tobin does, but she’s not sure if she’ll ever love herself enough to forget about her. 

Its that fatal flaw that finds her in a grocery store half an hour before closing, still in her carefully pressed work suit, hair beginning to fall out of its bun with her glasses pushed up into it, staring between the two tubs of pre-made salad in her hands, wondering whether it's cheaper to just make her own, or if the easiness of not having an extra fifteen minutes of prep outweighs that. Whether she really has the energy or care to make a salad for herself. Whether she’d be spending her money better to put them both back in favour of a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. 

The mechanical blue lighting makes her eyes ache a little, and the three coffee she’d had in two hours are still tugging at her viens a little too insistently for comfort. The store is only a few blocks from her house, but Christen still feels immeasurably weary over the concept of heading back to her no doubt too cold home to eat alone in front of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Maybe she should get the ice-cream. That way it's consciously pathetic. 

She almost drops both overpriced tubs of quinoa infested salad when she hears the voice of the ex wife she hasn’t seen in person for three years calling her name like a question and a prayer combined. She can’t help whirling around, even though she thinks her life could only be made easier by leaving right then without acknowledging whatever figment her imagination has conjured. It's instinct, really, because there's Tobin, wearing board shorts and a snapback and the same smile she had when they met, long before accusations and distance and better for worse becoming a meaningless phrase in her vernacular. She isn’t dressed for the evening chill, but she doesn’t look even the slightest bit bothered. Christen almost chokes on her tongue. 

“Can’t decide?” she asks, eyebrows raised in the amused way Christen recognises as her ‘I’m having to repeat myself’ expression, nodding at the salads. 

The lighting is all off, and Tobin looks like a different person and Christen feels thrown off kilter. As if the world has started spinning a fraction faster. Not quite enough to send them all to the ground, but fast enough that days don’t last the way they used to and everybody is forever trying to catch up with themselves. Tobin has always felt a little out of the realm of possibility, though. She should be steadier against it than she is, after all this time. 

“Tobin.” Christen croaks. And yes, Christen is an adult who has been through both expensive and extensive therapy to get over the college student in her brain who fell to her knees and said stupid, grandly romantic things like ‘I’d go anywhere for you’, but she’s also been through 10 hours of depositions in civil disputes today and if her articulation takes a hit when faced with her first love, well, sue her. It’s not like she wouldn’t win the case, anyway. 

“You always were indecisive.” Tobin smiles back, big and dopey. Anyone else would make it sound like an insult. Ghost of ex wives and all the things no one got over in divorce court past, and all that. Except that it's Tobin, and her eyes are earnest, and it's a little bizarre, but it's not cruel by any measure. 

“I didn’t know you were in LA.” Christen says. It's not a cruel comment, but she doesn’t really have an answer for it. She has lots of questions as to why Tobin is in her sacred post life altering decision beach safe haven, though. Not that she owns an entire city, but she does sort of feel like she won the custody battle on this one. 

“Yeah, I moved out here a few months back.” Tobin shrugs, like it's nothing. She’s still smiling at her, and Christen has to make a concerted effort to not let her eyes trail over her. She looks older, cheeks still holding the same laugh lines, but there's crinkles around her eyes now, too. Her hair is lighter and curling at the bottom. She looks good, but she also makes Christen feel a little like the already surreal quality of a grocery store at 9pm has finally succumbed to its predisposition to time travel and collapsed in on itself. 

Christen nods, hesitantly. She can’t help but feel if she had been the one to spot Tobin, she would’ve ducked into the closest aisle and ignored her until it became painfully obvious and they were both left with no choice but to engage. She wouldn’t have started with something so akin to an ‘I know you.’ That’s Tobin for you, though. 

“Do you like it?” it feels like the appropriate thing to say, like something your Mum might ask an old friend you’d ran into in a grocery store before she hissed at you how viscerally she disliked her the second she was gone. Suitably adult. Tobin grins easily, nodding her head in a low bob, and Christen guesses it's the right question, even if she thinks the best answer would be an insincere ‘good seeing you’ and walking away.

“Yeah, it’s great. I don’t know my way around much yet, but it’s cool.” Tobin shrugs.

“We should go to dinner sometime. I mean, like, I could show you around. Or just, you know, I could show you a restaurant. I am not a tour guide but - I grew up here, so I know my way around.” Christen wants to die. Wants to sink right through the floor and into whatever cement graveyard there is underneath. 

“I know you did, Chris.” Tobin says, tilting her head just slightly. “That’d be great. I’d like that.” 

Christen supposes she can’t rescind an offer that's already been accepted. Not in person, anyway. She could always bail later, but she’s not a great liar and doing it to Tobin’s face half a second after she’d accepted when there's no date or time and thus no valid excuse is not a move she’s prepared to make. Even if she’d offered purely on muscle memory. 

“Do you need my number? To organise it.” Christen asks, sighs inwardly, and decides she’s definitely going the ice cream route tonight. Even if it was $5 for an incredibly small amount. Her wallet could suffer the hit. 

“Depends, did you get a new one?” Tobin still looks earnest, but Christen gets the distinct impression she’s being teased, at least a little bit. She shakes her head and Tobin grins at her. “Then no.” 

“Good seeing you, Chris.” She says, already taking a step back. Christen nods blankly, watching Tobin’s smile soften as she turns to go, a brief flash of humour in her eyes as she says, “Let's avoid a salad place. Too many decisions.”, and then she’s gone. 

Christen thinks, vaguely, that maybe it was all a dream. Like she could go home and fall asleep and she’ll wake up as someone who doesn’t talk about her personal life but doesn’t really think too much about it either. Someone who can honestly say they haven’t spoken to their ex in years and has no plans to anytime soon. But the two salads are still sitting in her hands, condensation rising up around her grip on the weak plastic, a sharp reminder of the real world. She tosses them both back in the fridge and heads to the ice-cream section.

She goes home. If she takes longer to fall asleep that night, like the phantom hold of a marriage bed she’s long since outgrown is keeping her awake, well, there's no need to worry about it.


	2. Scenes from a Vegan Restaurant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for feedback and support on the last chapter!
> 
> Disclaimer: I still don't live in LA. Google maps is responsible for my understanding of its geography and the likelihood of being able to hear the ocean outside a vegan restaurant. 
> 
> The title of this chapter is a riff on 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant' by Billy Joel.

The more Christen thought about it, the less sure she was what exactly had possessed her to ask Tobin to dinner. She had no interest in making stilted conversation with her ex. No interest in discovering whether or not she still liked the same food. Whether or not the move to LA was a long term thing, whether Christen should find a new place to buy her groceries. She does not know, and so she goes about it as any mature adult would, and decides to bury it deep down and not address the issue until absolutely necessary. 

She figures if Tobin really wants to have dinner with her, if she wasn’t just saying yes to be polite, then she can go ahead and reach out, because Christen’s already been the idiot first once. Well, lots of times, really. Nine years is a lot of time with a lot of opportunity to let someone see every awful side of yourself, but Tobin was always leaving before levelling the score when it came to things like that. Until she takes that step, Christen is simply going to pretend that the supermarket really was a time warp.

Instead of fretting about it, she goes to work. Pours herself into case notes on the, frankly, extremely dry dispute over a building contractor's use of unsafe and flammable materials in a project and the resulting fire damage. It's likely to turn into wilful negligence. Christen is good at her job, she knows she’s got a good chance of winning for the landlord the firm is representing. That doesn’t mean she finds any of it particularly interesting. She had called her own contractor, though, just to make sure she wasn’t about to die in a fiery explosion. The verdict was that it was unlikely, since her house had been made to code, but that she should have maintenance done on her smoke detectors well because the risk of fire damage was far higher than one might think. Not a particularly reassuring thing to hear, but she’d take it.

It was times like that that Christen missed having a partner. Someone to stand in the doorway while a plumber poked around under the sink or the TV guy muttered about their wire job, to quirk an eyebrow over their heads and make her laugh on instinct, without even saying anything. Someone she could look across a room at during a dinner party or in a restaurant or in the middle of the longest day of her life and know, without a shadow of a doubt, from their answering look, exactly what they thought of it all. She longed to see ‘these people are so boring’ or ‘that's what she said’ or ‘i’ll love you forever’ written in someone's eyes again. Longed to turn away sure that the person knew her answer without either of them having spoken a word. Then she remembered she was meant to be enjoying solitude and had to consciously redirect her thoughts. She wasn’t even sure it was Tobin she missed. She just missed having something other than mirrors and dying flowers to go home to. 

Tobin hadn’t been around enough for Christen to really know about the intricacies of mundane marriage. When they’d first been together, Tobin had been bright and bold and so promisingly in love with her. She had sworn black and blue that she would make it and it would all be because of Christen. She thinks that if someone said that to her across a dinner table now she’d be out and calling a cab before she could call for the check. They’d never gotten to the parts of marriage Christen had observed in her friends. Didn’t set certain nights where one of them cooked and the other cleaned up like Ali and Ash. Tobin was always across the country with half the city falling at her feet. It didn’t leave much room for chore allocation. 

She keeps busy and doesn’t think about the past or the burning of her phone in her pocket. Tobin doesn’t text. She holds a meeting with her client and drafts a settlement she thinks gives him about twice as much as he deserves but still less than they’d get in a trial if Christen had her way, and Tobin doesn’t text. She has dinner with her Dad and Tyler, hears about her Dad’s attempts at growing tomatoes and laughs at Tyler’s teasing of him, and still, Tobin doesn’t text. Her Dad asks if she’s seeing anyone and she shakes her head with a forlorn smile and doesn’t mention Tobin, who does not text.

Not that she’s concerned about it. She isn’t, really. Why would she be? She’s hardly even noticed the lack of contact. Her locking her phone in her desk drawer to avoid the distraction during office hours is totally unrelated. She would’ve done it anyway, probably. Not that she ever has before. But it's a good, completely unprompted, habit to pick up. 

LA feels different knowing Tobin’s around. She’s not thinking about it, she really isn’t, but it sticks under her skin anyway, like a long forgotten itch she can never quite get at. She wonders if Tobin is frequenting the same places as her, wonders if at any moment she’s going to step up to retrieve her coffee order from the cart outside her work and be plunged back into her younger self, faced with warm brown eyes tinged with betrayal and earnestness. The coffee cart is situated in the business end of LA, positioned for corporate lawyers and their high flying clients, not a single anklet or tshirt saying ‘suns out, guns out’ anywhere to be found. Christen doubts it’s Tobin’s scene. Then again, she doesn’t really know her well enough to make that judgment call anymore.

She wonders what she did with the Portland apartment. It's not any of her business, but she can’t help the tinge of sadness that comes at the thought of Tobin selling it. She never wanted to step back through its door, but she still had affection for the place. She’d spent more nights alone in it then she cared to mention. Sometimes it had felt like her only constant. She considers googling the address to see if it's been listed. She slams her laptop shut on the realestate.com page and the idea before she has time to sabotage herself. 

Christen’s therapist had told her once that she placed too much of her energy in the past. That she needed to focus on being present, on making peace and moving on. She thinks Karen would probably be less than enthused with how easily she’s fallen victim to reminiscing on the state of her marital home. Instead of dwelling and wasting time and money on thought patterns she’d long since worked out, she packages the memory of the house and Tobin up into boxes. Tapes them together the way she did her all worldly belongings when she left. She shoves them into a corner and resolves not to think about it, and means it this time.

She calls mindfully single Chloe on a Thursday, because it’s been months since she’s seen her and some part of her is convinced that an orgasm might be all she needs. It helps a little. Chloe is breezy and fun and always gets her off. She arrives at Christen's house after work in cropped jeans and a beaded singlet with a bright grin, kissing her before the door is even shut. They’ve been screwing around long enough that there's no longer any weirdness afterwards. Christen brings her a glass of wine and they drink in her too large bed. She offers her left over pasta, and Chloe tells her about her week and a guy she’s been casually seeing. She doesn't spend the night, they both have work the next day, but Christen is left with enough of an ache in her muscles that she can sleep easily. 

Christen’s life functions as a well oiled machine. She wakes up at five-thirty every morning. She makes herself a cup of coffee and a light breakfast. She glances over her caseload and itinerary for the day at the kitchen counter, CNN droning on in the background. If she has to be in court that day she’ll check her emails and then rehearse whatever statement she has to make, clear with her annunciation, carefully shaping each vowel. At six she tames her curls back and dresses in whicher suit she laid out the night before and does her makeup. She’s out the door by six thirty and at the office by six-fifty. She orders a coffee from John’s cart just outside, who always smiles and calls her ‘Miss Press.’ He reminds her a little of her Dad, warm and welcoming with a broad grin. She does the days work, and does it well. She gets another coffee from John on her lunch break. She goes home when the work is done. She washes off the day and sets herself up to do it again. 

On Fridays she’ll have a drink with her colleagues. Jesse will tell her whatever office gossip she’s missed and complain under her breath about that paralegal bitch Tara and how she thinks she’s cheating on her boyfriend with their boss. Christen doesn’t think she is. She kind of likes Tara, actually, and she’s pretty sure their boss would have a heart attack at the mere insinuation that he’d ever be inappropriate with an employee, but she doesn’t mention it. She’ll wave off questions about her own personal life. Jokes that she’s married to the firm and dutifully ignores Todd, with his shiny shoes and whitened teeth, and his attempts to hit on her. 

She spends the weekends finishing work or prepping for the week ahead. She makes lunches to portion into containers for the freezer and reads books with titles like ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’. She goes to therapy every second Sunday, at this point more of an enshrined part of her routine than a necessity to keep her head above water. They talk about her Mum, about Christen’s struggle to make lasting friendships in LA, about any diversion Christen can throw in to keep them off the things she refuses to drag up.

It’s enough routine that she never has too long to think about the fact that her closest is largely empty of anything but her work clothes, or that she’d love to come home to a house that wasn’t so silent. There’s no direction to this version of her life, but at least it's solid. It's enough that she could almost forget that life was ever different. Until Tobin texts her half way through Saturday.

Unknown Number:  
2:34pm. Hey, Chris, it's Tobin. Was wondering if I could take you up on that dinner  
tonight?? :)

Christen has a routine. It doesn’t involve last minute dinner plans with the woman who broke her heart five years ago. She texts back a restaurant suggestion anyway.

*

For all that she’d resolutely avoided thinking about the possibility of actually having dinner with Tobin, she’s wildly unprepared to have to do so. She suggests a vegan restaurant nearby, partly because she wants to see if Tobin would say no, given her loud opinions on veganism when they last ate a meal together, partly because they have a salad bar and Christen knows exactly which one she’ll want. She’s not trying to prove anything. She is going to make it known that she is perfectly decisive, thank you very much, though.

She stares at the contents of her wardrobe for fifteen minutes before she concedes defeat and texts Ali. She’s not sure if Ali is qualified on what to wear to have dinner, but not a date, with a former spouse, but she’s not sure anyone really is, and Ali owns the nicest jeans of anyone she knows, so it's the safest bet. 

Christen:  
6:56pm. I am meeting Tobin for dinner. Jeans or skirt?

Ali:  
6:57pm. Ex-wife Tobin??!!

6:57pm. Are you serious?

7:04pm. Wear the blue maxi and a t-shirt if it's a casual, black dress if it's fancy. But I want details, Pressi!!

Christen:  
7:08pm. Thank you, Al. 

She leaves her curls down, applies her makeup, tries to enthuse her look with an air of ‘no big deal’, and hopes to god she sinks into the cement on her route and never has to face Tobin. It is not a date, and she hasn’t dressed to impress. She’ll have to wash the product out of her hair tomorrow morning, but she would do that for anyone. She doesn’t sink through the pavement. But she does end up waiting at a table in the quietly hip restaurant in downtown by herself for five minutes after their agreed meeting time. 

Here's the thing about Tobin: she has never been on time to anything in her life. Not once. When Christen had met her she’d found it endearing. It went against every instinct in her to show up fifteen minutes late with a shrug and an easy smile, but it was who Tobin was. It was just one of countless ticks she’d gazed at through starry eyes when it came to her. Its cute factor had decreased steadily year by year. Christen liked to be on time. She liked to be polite. She liked when her wife, who’d been out of town and almost unreachable for six weeks, showed up to the important work dinner she’d sworn she'd be on time to at seven, not a quarter past eight with wet hair. 

Tobin showed up for football and nothing else. Not even Christen. Not even when she asked her to come home if she wanted to discuss the state of their marriage, if she wanted to be there when Christen left forever. Christen expects nothing but tardiness, and she really doesn’t care, except for the waiter that looks at her tentatively after she decides what she’s going to get for mains but waves him off with only a drinks order until Tobin arrives. They’re not married anymore. Tobin can be as late as she likes, as long as she gets there before Christen gets hungry.

She arrives ten minutes after Christen, meandering up almost sheepishly, hostess by her side. She’s in a leather jacket Christen thinks she might recognise, but can’t be sure. She looks nice, sans snapback. More of a grownup than Christen had ever seen her. For a foolish second, the breath catches in her chest at the sight, before Christen reminds herself of a laundry list of reasons why this is a casual, totally chill, no big deal ‘welcome to LA, lose my number’ kind of meal, and makes a mental note to ask her doctor if she could have a chest infection that would explain her rattling breath. She has been fatigued lately. It’s possible. Tobin has the nerve to look guilty as she takes her seat, lips quirking in a downwards smile Christen can say with certainty she does indeed recognise. 

“Sorry I’m late. They’re not kidding about that LA traffic, huh?” It's a joke, but it's tentative, like she really is sorry. Christen has to school her features to not make known how surprised she is by it. 

“It's not a problem. I ordered wine, if that's alright with you?” Christen asks, nodding at the bottle between them at the table. 

“Yeah, Chris, that's great.” Tobin says. Christen bristles slightly at the soft way she says her name, but smiles anyway, and pours herself a glass. 

“It's good to see you.” She says, because she isn’t quite sure how else to fill the heavy silence between them. She’s not sure if good is really the right descriptor.

How exactly did one explain that you were as glad that someone had called as you were resentful that they had shown up? That as much as you would have been offended had they ghosted you, you’re still not sure you really have the stomach for this interaction. She’s not sure there is a way to express that. Not two sips into the first glass of wine, anyway.

There was a time when she and Tobin had been perfectly content sitting in silence. When they could lounge next to each other, sometimes almost on top of one another, without a single word exchanged. Often, Christen was certain Tobin could read her mind. That she could see her day step for step, could read her emotions as easily as a well illuminated message on her phone. What necessity did speaking serve when your partner knew every ounce of how you felt?

Whatever magic that had existed between them then, that allowed them to sit in the quiet and feel suitably heard, must have died with their relationship. Now, Christen only feels anxious and uncomfortable and like coming here may have been among her dumbest moves on the chess board of life. As if whoever she was playing against, God or the Devil or some funhouse mirror version of herself, perhaps a ficus tree, she really isn’t sure, has watched her make this move in a mix of fascination and hysterical laughter. This is the one to have her branded with a checkmate. Might as well give up now. She never even drank white wine and you bought her a bottle without asking. Neither of you are vegan and yet, here you are, in a vegan restaurant in LA that's seeming with kids the same age the two of you were when you got married and no one your age now that you’re strangers to each other. Check. Mate. And cheque, please. 

“It's good to see you too, Chris.” Tobin cuts through her hysteria with a soft smile. “You look nice.” she nods at Christen’s shirt, an artfully worn thing she can’t remember buying, but always pulls out for casual drinks and concerts. 

“You too. Working out?” Christen smiles impishly, and Tobin snorts into her wine.

“Something like that.” 

Just like that, it's easy. Not the way it was when they were young. Not spellbinding or life changing or as easy as breathing. But simple. Tobin laughs the same, bubbling in her chest and tipping her head back as her shoulders shake, even when it's not even that funny. It's the reaction she gets, with a fond head shake thrown in as Tobin refuses to explain herself, when Christen tells her she isn’t vegan, she just likes the mood of the place. Christen tells her about the firm, the new case, tosses out that Tobin should get her house inspected. Just in case. Tobin shoots her a funny look at that. Tobin tells her about football, about the surf since she’s been in LA, about what she and Allie have been up to. 

Christen would almost be surprised how much muscle memory she has for talking to Tobin. ‘Would’ being the operative word. She’s long since become used to the note of unexpectedness to interaction with Tobin. It's an instinct long dormant, but one she still has nonetheless. It's easy, if unexpected, to suggest her favourite, and least vegan tasting, pie for dessert when Tobin gets stuck surveying the menu with a pout. Easy to know the punchline of her jokes before Tobin gets to them. As easy to nudge the salt over without prompting as it is for Tobin to wave down a glass of water for her between glasses of wine. 

“Chris, I swear, she fell out a bin-” Christen can’t help but join Tobin in laughing obnoxiously loudly as she describes Allie’s ill fated attempts at pranking her teammates. She thinks some of the twenty-somethings might be cutting them strange looks, but she can’t find it in herself to care. Her stomach aches a little from the laughter, and her cheeks are flushed. 

“I’ve missed her.” Christen sighs when she’s settled down enough to get words out and instantly regrets it. Tobin gives her a resigned smile.

“Yeah.” She hums, finger tracing the rim of her wine glass. The sinking feeling of before settles back into Christen’s stomach. “She gives me a hard time about you alot.” 

“Oh?” Christen has to try very hard to cough on her sip of wine, swallowing it with a little more force than necessary as she watches Tobin. Tobin, who is suddenly intently focused on her napkin. She hums an affirmative. 

“She says I was an idiot. With you.” Tobin says. She looks up, meets Christen’s gaze. She’s curled in on herself a little, Christen can’t help but realise, her left shoulder slumping forward while her right arm, propped over the back of her chair, fiddles with the fraying edge of the napkin. Her eyes are still beautiful. 

“Do you agree?” Christen asks, because she’s wondered about it for five years. Because as much as she’s tried to close the chapter, she still wonders sometimes how long it took for Tobin to realise she was serious when she said she was done. How she felt. What she did. Why she let her leave. 

Tobin’s face contorts in something like pain, and she drops her gaze back to the table. Christen hates that for as much as Tobin remembers she always drinks water between wines, and that she always said she wouldn’t go fully plant based because she worried about her iron levels, Christen can’t read her anymore. She could as easily be about to change the subject because it's weird as she could be about to go into a long exploration of her feelings because she still has plenty. The latter would be strange, for a woman who’d just about thrown a tantrum when Christen suggested couples counselling, but Christen honestly couldn't rule it out. 

“Yeah, Chris.” She says, staring at a point past Christen’s shoulder. Christen doesn’t really know what to do with that, so she finishes her wine and watches as Tobin finishes her pie with a shake of her head, claiming vegans had forgotten what pie was meant to taste like. 

She hopes, for the sake of her sanity, that Ali - who will follow this up, of that Christen has no doubt - will believe her when she tells her that it was a simple dinner between very old friends, with no emotional weight to it. Maybe she’ll tell her it was more of a business meeting to settle some bizarre clause in the prenup. They didn’t have one, Tobin had insisted it was unnecessary and Christen had believed her when she’d said they’d never split up like it was obvious, but she wasn’t sure whether or not Ali knew that. It's not true, but does that really matter anymore? 

Tobin grabs the bill before Christen can, shrugs off her attempts to pay, muttering about how Christen was doing her a favour by showing her LA, and the least she could do was ‘pay for her kale’. There was absolutely no kale anywhere in Christen’s meal, but she’s pretty sure Tobin doesn’t care about that particular detail. 

“Are you parked nearby?” Christen asks when they're standing on the street outside the restaurant.

If she listens intently, past the traffic and noise of kids talking shit while they smoked on the corner, she can hear the beach. She can certainly smell it, feel it in the air. They’re near enough Venice it's a possibility. It might be wishful thinking, but the ocean feels less unlikely now than it did a fortnight ago. 

The sun has long since set, but the smog and the street lamps have kept it light enough that she can see Tobin’s face clearly, cast in an orange glow. Her arms are wrapped tightly across her chest, pulling her jacket in snug around herself. She looks cold, for once. She used to be impossibly warm all of the time. Christen would shove her hands under Tobin’s coat whenever they got too cold, Tobin hissing in surprise and then laughing without complaint. 

“Couple blocks. You?” Tobin says.

“Oh. No. I walked.” Christen shifts awkwardly.

“Shit, Chris. It's dark out. There could be robbers.” Tobin smiles, then, broad and with a shake of her head. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.” 

Christen can think of few things she wants to do less then get in a car with the ex she doesn’t let herself think about for more than a fleeting moment at a time for fear she’ll do or say something rash. Things she’d rather do include walking a tightrope in the circus and jumping from a plane with a parachute prone to breaking.

“I’ll get an Uber.” She says, the tone she normally keeps for the courtroom and directing the interns doing pro bono work for their degrees around coming in strong. No room for argument. Tobin looks a little taken aback for half a second. Christen isn’t surprised. She’s a little taken aback herself.

“Ok.” she says, stepping back a little. “You know, we’re uh, we’re playing at the Rose Bowl week after next. Allie would love to see you, if you’d want to come.” 

Christen can think of many reasons she shouldn't get in a car with Tobin. She can think of even more reasons why she should absolutely not go and watch her in her element on a football field. Shouldn't let herself see Allie, because if she sees Allie she’ll be reminded of being 21. Shouldn’t go because Kelley will be there too, and it’ll be the perfect viewing party to the life she used to be sure she would have one day. The life Tobin surrendered theirs in favour of. 

She should say no, but she’s never said no to Allie before, so instead she looks at the hope in Tobin’s eyes and quirks a little smile.

“I’d like that, Toby.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to come talk to me at softnoirr on tumblr.


	3. I can't say hello to you (and risk another goodbye)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?" - Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a long one.

Christen prides herself on her intelligence. She is a shark in the courtroom. She can pick out minute details in depositions that change the course of a case. She can tell you about United Nations human rights conventions and which is the most ratified - the Convention on the Rights of the Child, understandably - a skill picked up in the few months she thought she could be a warrior for justice in international law. She won debate competitions in High School. She’s not stupid, is the point. There’s a law degree hanging in her office to attest to that. 

Trying to explain herself, let alone to Ali when she calls her, voice laced with frantic concern, why she agreed to go to dinner with her ex wife and first real love, who Christen certainly shouldn’t be around, well, it's enough to make her consider the possibility that she is an idiot. Truly. It is among her worst judgement calls to date. She’s not sure she even made any sort of judgement. She just called. Add in the fact that she’s agreed to watch her play soccer in a packed stadium in Pasadena Christen had sat in with starry eyes as a child during a World Cup final, there's a good case for her idiocy. 

Not that she’s mentioned the last part to her friend. She thinks she would give up on her entirely if she knew that. Christen might just give up on herself for it. She wonders idly if you can sue yourself for emotional damages. She’s a good lawyer, but she’s not convinced even she can conjure up any legal basis. 

Instead, she tells Ali she went to dinner with Tobin because they are friends. That Tobin is in town and has her number and maybe they’ll talk again, but Christen doubts it. They share history and nostalgia but not much else, so dinner is nice, but dinner is all there is. She says she expects Tobin will be up and gone soon, anyway, flighty as she is. She doesn’t mention how her chest had ached a little at the sight of Tobin’s hope in the LA evening breeze. She’s not lying, exactly, but it settles with a note of fallacy.

“Which outfit did you wear?” Ali demands, over the phone when Christen calls her from work on Monday, having successfully dodged her calls for the entirety of the weekend. Christen loves Ali, but Ali’s been with the same person for twelve years, and she’d actually managed to keep her marriage afloat, and Christen really doesn’t need to compare the collapse of her own life to that. 

“The maxi, like you told me. It was casual, like I told you.” She says, placatingly. The skirt was crumpled at the bottom of her laundry hamper. It still smells a little like Tobin’s perfume and the wine they’d shared.

“Which top?” Christen rubs at the pressure headache building between her eyebrows, letting her head fall back against her desk chair.

“The grey one with the rips, I think” She mumbles back, trying to drag it to the forefront of her mind while simultaneously attempting to bury every memory of the dinner. 

“The one Tobin bought you?” Ali’s voice is questioning, but it holds a backlog of tension. Christen scrambles upright in her seat.

“What? No, she didn’t buy it. It's mine.” She says. Christen had had that top for years. At least six. She doesn’t remember when she got it, just knows she wore it to a barbeque with her former in-laws in what feels like a different life. But there was no way she had forgotten a detail like that about it. Especially when faced with the alleged purchaser. 

“Chris-” 

“No, Ali. You must have gotten confused. It’s mine.” She cuts across Ali’s sigh before she can get started. She can’t be right about this. It’s not possible. There has to be something left in this world that belongs to her. 

Silence hangs between them down the line, crackling and a door closing from Ali’s end. The printer outside Christen’s office is churning out about 200 pages of case notes, and Christen tries to match her heart beat to the steady ChaChak sound it makes. Ali breathes a pretty little sigh she normally reserves for when she’s given up on proving her case. 

“You don’t have to talk to her if you’re uncomfortable, Chris. I am sure Tobin would understand.” Ali says. 

The thing is, Christen is well aware that she doesn’t have to talk to Tobin, does not have to go to the game. That it would be entirely reasonable, if not prudent, to simply message Tobin that something came up and she won’t be there, but hey, good luck. That would the self preservationists move. But she doesn’t think Tobin would understand. She thinks Tobin would look at her with sad eyes fanned by long eyelashes and say ‘oh’, and Christen would want to give her anything she asked for to make it better. 

She’s not really sure how one goes about getting out of such a promise. Especially if Tobin has already told Allie. Bailing on her seems worse than bailing on Tobin, somehow. Particularly given Tobin’s casual mention of Allie still talking about her. She’s let down Allie once already. Tobin had let her down all the time, but Allie hadn’t. Repaying them in kind seems only fair. 

It’s not that she’s uncomfortable, either. She’s sick over the thought of replicating the weekends of her late teens and 20s spent in a Heath - 17 jersey, cheering and grinning and smiling brightly for photos with Tobin in the tunnel, but she’s not necessarily uncomfortable with it. She’s an adult. She thinks she could get through it with a little awkwardness and plenty of maturity. She doesn’t trust herself enough to be around Tobin, though. Not a Tobin with sweaty hair and adrenaline pulsing through her. Not in person. Christen doesn’t struggle to stay mad at the image of her stone faced ex wife giving her the silent treatment as Christen begged her to talk to her. She struggles not to care for the image of Tobin she’s seen glimpses of on ESPN since. 

The life Christen lives does not account for Saturdays in football stadiums, or for brown eyes looking at her like she has all the answers. It hardly accounts for dinner with Ashlyn and Ali, let alone seeing the friends she hadn’t kept in the divorce. The ones who had departed from her life with a horrified look and an offer to buy Tobin a drink. She can’t do it again. She thinks she’s probably going to anyway. Christen isn’t a masochist, but she is largely comprised of bad habits and scar tissue. Its muscle memory to fall for Tobin.

“I know. I’ll think about it.” She says, in what she hopes is an unaffected but genuine tone. 

Ali hangs up fifteen minutes later, after telling Christen all about how Ashlyn had brought her home flowers after work on Friday ‘just because she loves her.’ Christen has to work to keep herself from sounding bitter when she says goodbye. 

*

She wasn’t lying when she had said she would think about it. In fact, it's almost all she thinks about. The ultimate, insurmountable problem with the rigidity of her life, for all that it allowed her a path to carry on down where there was otherwise a screaming end and lights and sirens, was that there was a lot of time for Christen to think. A lot of time for new variables to fester and grow. It was easy to go to the supermarket at the end of each Wednesday and buy what she needed for the week, based off a shopping list and a budget app, but it was just as easy to linger by the frozen meals and wonder if she was about to turn the corner and be faced with Tobin again. Just as easy to run her finger along the label of the shampoo Tobin used to wear. 

She gets a google ad for US vs Ireland, a bright red, white and blue banner, with a picture of Alex, god, how long had it been since she’d seen Alex, decked out in the US kit and staring down the camera challengingly. Christen is just glad it isn't Tobin. She’d once teased her for the fake smile she wore in all of her promotional photos. She’d once stolen Tobin’s still sweaty jerseys after games to wear to her next. She’d left those behind in Portland, along with their wedding photos and the best coffee machine she’d ever owned. The make and model had been discontinued when she’d gone looking for it once she made it to California. She closes the tab with the ad in it without even remembering what she had opened it for. 

Ali messages her on and off throughout the week, little attempts at reassurances she only bothers with when she thinks Christen is a wrong move away from turning herself into a full blown Ophelia. It's sweet, but it's misguided. She’s fine. Really. She responds with heart emojis and a promise to see her at dinner with Pinoe and Ash in a few weeks. Ali lets the messages patter off, eventually, and Christen is thankful to be under no obligation to explain herself. 

She gets a text from Tobin at five am a week after they last spoke. It wakes her up before her alarm, because she doesn’t think she’s gotten to the deep stages of sleep in six years. It takes as little as a gust of wind to raise her. She can’t tell if the wake up call or the contact name is what puts her in a bad mood.

Tobin:  
5.00am: Hey, Chris. Got some tickets for you for our game if you still want to come. I can email them. Let me know :)

Christen tosses her phone onto the nightstand and falls back into a fitful sleep. She hits snooze twice and ends up ten minutes late, rushing past John with an apologetic smile and a promise to get a coffee and ask about his golf trip on her lunch break. A lunch break she never gets to have, because her computer shuts down halfway through an email and she spends a good two hours waiting for and then arguing with I.T. She is well aware that sometimes turning it off and on again helps, but given that the issue at hand is that it won’t turn on to begin with, the advice isn’t really that applicable. 

She spills instant coffee from the break room all over herself and has to spend the rest of the day arguing with one of the junior partners about the correct angle to approach a case from while smelling of home brand caffeine, the type that comes in value backs and leaves a film on your teeth. She’s not sure why it's what they have in the breakroom when they have quarter of a million dollar retainers, but Christen supposes people get used to the way they’re valued. It's nothing compared to the smooth burn of the coffee from the machine back in Portland, something she isn’t thinking about. 

Christen likes her job well enough. She likes the details and focus required for arguing a case, likes the satisfaction of a won case. She used to dream of using her degree to change the world. Of going into human rights law and freeing asylum seekers and protecting mothers and their children. A brief foray into environmental law, perhaps, but helping people, above all else. Her Mother used to say that she would take the world by storm. Brokering deals for as much money as possible over technicalities of law with two corrupt sides and a fruitless disagreement between them isn’t quite where she thought she would end up. Christen had just wanted to help people, but she supposes this is fine too. It pays well, she’s almost happy. 

The office is filled with people who want as much money as they can milk from the profession and kids needing to get their first years of experience if they want to be made partner somewhere noteworthy before 25. There are no stories of bright eyed pioneers having the life burnt out of them, most of them are just content, or showed up with nothing left to burn. Christen was one of the latter. Most days, she doesn’t mind. When her boss snaps at her over a slight error in a document that's only being emailed back and forth between them, she decides that today is not one of those days.

It is, all up, a bad day. She almost forgets about Tobin. Almost, because she spends what little free time she does have wondering why Tobin, who had frequently inflicted her predisposition for lateness on Christen by dragging her back to bed, was up and messaging at five in the morning. It was perfectly possible she’d left LA and wandered into a completely separate timezone, Christen supposes. But she doesn’t like that thought, and so she resolves to ignore it. 

Christen is holed up in bed while Netflix plays mindlessly in the background before she remembers the text and the read receipt she’d left under it when she was too blurry eyed to do much else. She sighs when she sees it and sends Tobin her email address. In days gone by she would have made a pros and cons list, now, she just misses her friends. Either she’ll get to stand in the sunshine again for a moment, or she’ll be reminded of the rain clouds. Regardless, she can let whatever this foolishness is die with a football game and a passing hello to Allie to uphold her promise. 

*

Christen feels a little sick. The sun is hot on her back and Jesse’s chewing and running commentary of which players she judged to be the hottest too loud in her ear. She is almost certain that she’s going to have a sweat patch at the back of her shirt before the game is over. It’s thick cotton and the LA sun has no qualms in beating down on her in an uncovered arena. Their seats are good, in the front row near the benches, but there's no shade to speak of. If she’d bitten the bullet and worn the sweat absorbent jersey hidden in her chest of drawers she would have saved herself some trouble. She also would’ve died of shame. 

Jesse had met Christen outside the venue decked out in what looked to be a brand new Alex Morgan jersey and facepaint, eager to drink beer and cheer on the US. Christen hadn’t quite gotten around to mentioning that one of the players also doubled as her ex wife. Come to think of it, she wasn’t entirely certain Jesse was aware that she’d ever been married. Which was largely the reason she’d invited her when she’d seen that Tobin had sent through two tickets instead of the one. 

Bored by Jesse’s rambling about the merits of a goalkeeper as a girlfriend and whether or not Jesse has what it takes to make the national team if you ignore the fact that she had never touched a ball before the age of 29, Christen turns to her phone, humming occasionally to keep her engaged. She has an unanswered message from Tobin, the latest in a steady stream of emoji laden messages about LA weather and if Christen knew how to get to her seats and if she’d maybe want to get a drink with Allie and some of the other girls after the game. Tobin always had a penchant for over texting. That and long periods of silence. Christen had agreed to the drink with only slight hesitation. A bar was a perfectly appropriate place to see Allie. She’d have one drink and head out. Simple

The message was a simple ‘hope you have fun, talk later.’ The kind of thing she’d gotten from Tobin a thousand times in what felt like a different life. It makes her heart constrict a little at the normalcy. Christen doesn’t know if she wants to live in the feeling or run from it. Either way, she can’t help the slight smile that turns up her lips as she responds.

Christen  
12.15pm: Good luck! Score a goal for me. 

She shuts her phone off before she can overthink it and tunes back in to whatever Jesse is on about. Tobin probably won’t see it until after the game anyway, the teams had already finished warm ups by the time they’d gotten into their seats, a few stragglers wandering down the tunnel as fans pleaded with them for autographs. Tobin hadn’t been among them. 

Christen is a beer deep by the time the anthem is played, the sun only adding to the calm in her muscles. Christen wants to be sick at the sight of Tobin scanning the crowd, hand in hand with a seven year old mascot, as she takes the pitch behind her teammates, but she also can’t help but smile as she watches the team line up and turn to the flag. Can’t help but be reminded of the last time she was in this stadium, hair in pigtails and her Dad right behind her as they cheered on a very different US team. She thinks he’d like to know she’s there reliving it, but telling him about it requires admitting that this time she isn’t a little girl, she’s a full grown woman who should know better than to invite this sort of trouble back into her life. She’s not really ready for him to know how much of a mess of her life she’s made. 

They play well. Christen hasn’t seen Tobin play football in five year years. Not since the last home game she’d attended in Portland. When she’d shown up braced for a fight and Tobin had given her one in the training room without a single care about how many people heard them snapping viscously at each other before she stormed off and disappeared for the evening. Even then, with anger bubbling just under the surface as Christen watched her from the box, she had been magic. Five years have only served her well. She moves with grace and precision and a deadly glint that Christen would love if it weren’t for how severely it cut. 

She scores almost twenty minutes in, and Christen swears she's looking through the crowd with a grin before her teammates tackle her into hugs. The breath catches in her throat, and it takes Jesse screaming in her ear in excitement to have her lungs caught up. She shoots her friend what she hopes is a genuine smile and claps along with the rest of the crowd, encaptured by Tobin’s genius. She’s subbed off just after the half, and the crowd roars their praise as she leaves the field. 

Tobin has always been special. Special to Christen, of course, but special to everyone as soon as she stepped on a football pitch or had a ball at her feet, which was a lot. Something about her drew eyes. She had always had Christen’s attention. Since the second she stepped into a frat party with a toothy smile and laid back attitude and offered to teach Christen how to play beer pong. They’d lost, pathetically, but Tobin had just shrugged and said she’d have to buy her dinner sometime to make up for wasting her time. Christen had been hooked almost instantly. If she hadn’t been falling then, well, she was catapulting towards the ground the second she watched Tobin play. She’d taken for granted that Tobin would catch her, and now she had to watch her with nine years of baggage between them rather than 50 years of marital bliss laid out diligently before them by Christen’s steady hand.

The US win, and Jesse spills half her beer all over herself in excitement when the final whistle blows, despite the score having been stacked so heavily in their favour there hadn’t ever been much doubt in the outcome. Christen laughs at her with a shake of her head, passing her a napkin from her bag and handing her a piece of gum to help cover the smell of booze on her breath, Jesse promising loudly to cover her next time. She’s not sure how exactly she plans on finding an opportunity to repay a few tissues and a stick of gum, or why she feels it necessary to pay it back, but she doesn’t push it. 

Jesse rises to go, brushing off her lap while Christen keeps her eyeline firmly on the pitch, scanning the groups of players milling around. “Christen, should we head off?” Jesse asks, already bundling up her things. 

“Yeah.” she smiles, tearing her gaze off the field. “Yeah, lets go.”

She parts ways with Jesse in the car park, not willing to admit that her plans expand past the game. Jesse knows she moved to LA four and a half years ago. Knows that at some point in her life she had a partner. Knows she's a good lawyer and makes decent brownies. Thinks she wants to go to the football because she’d played growing up and seen the World Cup as a kid. That’s all the information she needs, and Christen isn’t willing to give her even a sliver more. 

For as much as she knows it's a bad idea, Christen can’t help but be excited as she heads to the bar. Studiously following the instructions of her car's navigator, though she thinks she could make the route blind folded, and is almost certain that she’d get there five minutes faster if she’d turned right when it told her to stay left. She figures she’s not paid to map out routes, though, so she sticks to the neon yellow path it draws out for her. By the time she parks, there's a broad grin broken out across her face, cheeks aching as it grows.

Intellectually, Christen is sure that these are people that likely don’t even want her around all that much. As much as Ashlyn had very seriously asked if she should burn every picture she had with Tobin when Christen had shown up at their house with tears streaming down her cheeks, waking them up at 4am, she is sure that she is the villain in their story. Hell, sometimes she’s the villain of her own. Sometimes, when the house is particularly cold, or her friends seem particularly happy without her, she wonders what would have happened if she would have just stayed. Probably, she would’ve been kicked out a few weeks later without the chance to select which books she wanted to take with her. 

She can’t help but want them, though. Christen hasn’t had friends willing to tease her, tug her braids and ask about what she was doing with a smile in years. She had friends that held her like glass and spoke about the perfectness of their lives. She had acquaintances that set her up on blind dates and bought her secret santa gifts that revealed how little they truly knew her. She’d gotten a festive scented candle two years in a row. They were both on the top shelf of her hallway cupboard, wicks still in touch. She considered regifting them each holiday. 

It would be nice to pretend, even if it was just for an evening. Even just for the space of one drink. Just enough to leave her happy and relaxed, but not enough to loosen her lips or lower her awareness. She still has a mountain of work to get through, after all. She wants them, but you can’t have everything you want, and she doesn’t want any of the history she’s tried burning off her record these last years. So one drink it is. 

She spots them the second she walks in, eyes falling to a booth in the back, four wet haired soccer players squeezed into it. The last time Christen had walked into a bar to the scene, Tobin had been trailing behind her with flushed skin and a dopey smile, giving Kelley the finger when she asked where they’d been with a wiggle of her eyebrows. Now, Tobin is among the group, muttering seriously to Alex with a slight frown. It’s so achingly familiar and painfully new Christen doesn't know what to do with herself, lingering by the doorway. Wondering if she could escape. If she really wants to. 

No sooner has she focused her gaze on them and taken a tentative step forward than Allie is across the bar and flinging her arms around Christen’s neck. It startles a laugh from her, bringing her hand up to pat at her back gently, even as she attempts to regain her balance. With the hold Allie has on her, she's pretty sure if one of them falls, they both do, but she's also not sure Allie cares. Allie had always been one of Christen’s favourite people. She had no qualms calling Tobin on her shit or hyping up whatever outfit Christen was wearing, regardless of whether it was her nicest dress or her rattiest track pants. She was a little like an older sister away from home, something sorely needed when Christen had first been all alone but for Tobin in Oregon.

“Oh my god, Chris, I’ve missed you so much.” Allie squeals into Christen’s ear. She grins, untangling herself from Allie to try and get a glimpse of her face.

“I’ve missed you too, Al.” She sighs. Allie looks a little older, her makeup clean lines and bold colours. Christen remembers smudged eyeliner and sleepy smiles and nights bleeding into sunrise. She remembers being 21 and thinking they had their whole lives ahead of them. Remembers thinking that she could bend the world to her will until she made sure of it. She doesn’t think that anymore.

“Come on, we need to get boozed up so you can tell me how amazingly I played today.” Allie declares, looping her arm through Christens and dragging her through the crowd.

“You played great, Al.” she says. 

Allie grins smugly “Of course I did.” 

Christen can’t help but chuckle, letting Allie pull her towards the booth. Alex and Kelley aren’t paying them any attention, Alex is buried in her phone and Kelley in her beer, but Tobin looks up as they approach, and Christen has to try not to trip over her own feet. Her gaze is piercing, and Christen thinks she might just sink through the floor. 

Tobin has always looked good after games. All shiny skin and wet hair. Her hair, light brown that looked like spun gold in the sun and had attached itself to Christen’s pillows for years, is drying quickly against the heat of the bar, curling at the bottom in knotts. There's a furrow in between her eyebrows when she meets Christen’s eyes, and she has to remind herself that smoothing it and all her troubles away is an impulse she no longer has the right to. She really shouldn’t be around Tobin like this, but she follows Allie anyway.

“Chris!” Kelley proclaims loudy, choking on a mouthful of her beer as she looks up at her with a wicked grin, Allie pushing her to the front of the table without hesitation. Alex, from where she’s wedged between Kelley and Tobin, pats her back lightly, sending Christen a guarded smile. “Holy shit, look at you”

Christen laughs lightly as Kelley gestures at her. There’s definitely a sweat patch visible through her shirt, and she has no doubt her makeup is smudged and hair frizzing, but she can’t help but blush. “Thanks, Kel. It's good to see you.” 

“How are you, Christen?” Alex asks, perfectly pleasant as Allie shoves Christen into the booth. Christen falters slightly but shifts up to settle into her seat next to her while Allie flits off with a promise to bring back drinks.

If it weren’t for the acidic taste in her mouth, and the fact that Christen was three people away from Tobin, instead of half on her lap, it would almost be like the early days. After Tobin first got drafted and Christen dropped everything to trail after her. That had been the first of many diversions from Christen’s carefully plotted life. The beginnings of the years she spent desperately trying to lay tracks as the train came hurtling along behind her.

“I am fine, thanks.” it's awkward and unsure, but she keeps a smile fixed anyway and Alex nods her approval. Christen has always been a little unnerved by her presence. The intensity of her gaze never seemed to ebb. Even around friends. Tobin used to shrug it off, insist that was just how Alex was. Came with the territory, she said. Christen wasn’t really sure what the territory was, but she had accepted it nonetheless. 

“I am so glad you came, man. Tobin hasn’t shut up about you all week, it's like the rookie days all over again.” Kelley says, rolling her eyes and sipping at her beer. Tobin shoots her a dark look. Christen isn’t really sure what to do with that, so she just takes the drink Allie places in front of her as she slides into the booth and drinks. 

“Good to see you again, Chris.” Tobin says, quietly, as Allie and Kelley start arguing over whether or not Bud Light was an acceptable beer to drink. Her gaze is gentle, welcoming, and unsure. Christen returns it with a smile. She thinks she might be a little drunk on Tobin’s presence. She can’t find it in herself to cut herself off. 

It’s surprisingly easy to fall into routine. They tell jokes she doesn’t understand. Allie describes her wedding in graphic detail when Christen comments on the diamond on her ring finger, Tobin picking at the label on her beer bottle and Christen nodding along unseeingly as she’s shown picture after picture. It feels a little like a knife in her gut. She hadn’t even realised Allie had gotten engaged, and yet, there was the proof, including Tobin in a bridesmaid's dress and an anecdote about her terrible speech that earns Allie and Alex a mumbled ‘shut up’ from Tobin. Christen giggles, and Tobin meets her eye with a smile and roll of her eyes. Christen breaks the stare first. 

It reminds Christen a little of the nights in Portland after Thorns games. When they had stars in their eyes and Tobin would kiss her senseless the second she got a chance. The bar is hot, the table sticky, but Christen is willing to ignore the smell of sweat in favour of hearing Kelley cackle over Allie’s teasing of Alex’s missed goal and Tobin’s refusal to admit to having committed a foul. She only keeps up with about half what they’re talking about, but she feels warm on the insides. It has been a while since she was so at ease. Tobin winks at her across the table when Alex is telling a story that sounds about 80% fabricated and Christen flushes before reminding herself she’s a grown woman and looks away. 

The sun is almost set by the time Christen runs out of disbelief to suspend. She’s had two drinks, a glass of water in between each and after the last. She hardly trusts herself on her best, clearest day. She certainly doesn’t trust herself around alcohol and nostalgia. Drinking to keep up with professional athletes high off the adrenaline of a win was never a good idea, though she’d once poisoned her liver attempting to do so. She’d done a lot to keep up with them. That felt like a lifetime ago now. 

“I should probably go” She sighs, checking the time on her phone briefly, the pre set lock screen glaring up at her mockingly. She’d never bothered to change it after she bought the phone. What was there she wanted to be reminded of every time the screen lit up? Half the photo frames in her house were empty, anyway. It was artful if you committed to it fully enough. 

“I’ll walk you out.” Tobin says, sudden, eyes set on Christen surely. She ignores the look Alex sends her way. “I was on my way out, anyway” she shrugs. Christen just nods, grabbing her bag and pushing herself up from the table.

“Well, I came with Tobin so I guess I am out too.” Kelley grumbles, but she sends Christen a cheeky grin that says she doesn’t really mind. Christen just laughs while Allie smothers her in a hug and makes her promise not to be a stranger. They’ve never been strangers, but it's a hollow promise, regardless. 

Christen mumbles her goodbyes to Alex and follows Kelley and Tobin through the bar towards the door, trying not to notice the set of eyes burning a hole in the back of her head. Christen has no idea what she’s doing, or why she keeps ending up here. Or why the hell she’s tearing herself up over it, but then Tobin’s hand brushes the small of her back as she holds the door for her, and Christen doesn’t have room to consider anything else. 

“Nice goal today.” She tells Tobin as they wander down the street outside. Christen’s car is only a street away, by most estimates a stroke of luck in such a busy area, but it feels like a thousand miles. Kelley’s a few paces ahead of them, kicking an empty coke can along with her. If she still knew her as she once had, Christen would insist she took it with her and recycled it when she reaches her car. Instead, she bites her lip and stays quiet.

Tobin grins at her, twinkle in her eye. “You told me to score for you.” 

It startles a laugh from Christen, who, in the whirlwind of emotions, had almost totally forgotten the text she’d sent. She certainly hadn’t expected for Tobin to comment on it, or even see it until far later, really, given her general aversion to checking her notifications. 

“And we all know Tobes here would do anything for you, Press.” Kelley sing-songs, smirking at them over her shoulder. Tobin rolls her eyes, but Christen’s stomach sinks. Because, no, she really wouldn’t. 

She wouldn’t, she had made that much painfully clear to Christen. Had stuck to it even as Christen had begged her to take it back, begged her to give her a single reason to hold out hope. Had convinced herself it was heat of the moment, that Tobin didn’t mean what she’d said, though her actions only supported her words, was so sure she could just get her to apologise and they could move on and fulfil all the beautiful plans they had for their lives, could finally go on that honeymoon to Fiji. Instead, Tobin had dug her heels in, and now Christen lives in California and falls asleep alone, the tan on her left ring finger matching the rest of her hand. She was an idiot even agreeing to come. 

Christen isn’t in the habit of feeling sorry for herself. She knows, of course she knows, that her life is a little like trying to walk through wet cement, but she doesn’t mind all that much, as long as there's cement to keep walking through; as long as she doesn’t sink. She had been bright and burning once, meticulous and ambitious, and it had landed her here. It's ok to be quiet, sometimes. Hope is fragile and fleeting and has left her in the ruins of a civilisation she’d tried to mould like clay one too many times. She’s not hopeless. She’s just not anticipating anything good. Christen’s been left in the rain by Tobin before, she should be used to it, but Kelley’s comment leaves ice in her veins. 

It's just too much. 

She swallows thickly and wraps her arms across her stomach, picking up her pace just enough to fall out of step with Tobin, leaving her suspended between her and Kelley on the footpath. Tobin frowns at her shift in attitude, but Christen doesn’t meet her eye, just focuses on counting the cracks in the pavement. She matches each step so her heel digs into the gaps. She can’t really feel it through the soul of her shoe, but she imagines it lines up perfectly with the curve of her foot, each careful step filling the empty space. She makes it six and a half before her car is in front of them and she can dig her keys from her bag and unlock it. 

Her car is clean and smells like leather polish, and she can’t wait to get out of the evening air and surround herself with it. Rid herself of the lingering scent of warm beer and Tobin’s perfume and the past. Go back to citrus car freshener and the real world. She has the door half open before she turns back to look at Kelley.

“It was good seeing you, Kel. You played great.” she says, clearing her throat around the lump that's suddenly stuck in it and giving her a tense smile. Kelley stops short, blinking at Christen in surprise. 

“Uh, yeah. You too.” She says, cautiously, cutting Tobin a confused look. Tobin just watches Christen, who still doesn’t meet her gaze. She knows if she did she would cry, and she’d promised herself a long time ago that she was done crying in front of Tobin. She doesn’t know why she’s upset. She supposes she had assumed they’d all made peace with Tobin’s indifference towards her. Perhaps she hadn’t done as good a job at that as she had thought.

“Ok. Bye.” She’s in the front seat with the keys in the ignition before Kelley even has time to respond, blinking violently until her eyes are almost uncomfortably dry. 

“See you, Chris.” Tobin echoes after her, honey brown eyes peeping through the tinted glass of her window. Christen pulls away from the curb with a nod, driving until Tobin, staring after her in the middle of the street, is no longer visible in the rearview window. She doesn’t cry. 

She’s not a little girl, anymore. She’s not Tobin’s wife, anymore. Crying has long since outlived its purpose. Christen just wants to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come chat to (or yell at) me at softnoirr on tumblr.


	4. I'll look after you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There now, steady love, so few come and don't go  
> Will you won't you, be the one I'll always know?"
> 
> \- Look After You, The Fray

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some revelations, some chest infections, some confessions. 
> 
> This chapter deals with discussions of a respiratory illness. It's not Covid-19, nor is covid discussed or relevant in anyway. Its a chest infection as a plot device, but be aware if you're likely to find this distressing in any way.

Christen gets sick and feels very sorry for herself. The doctor informs her it's a run of the mill chest infection and is extremely unlikely to turn into pneumonia, despite what she may have convinced herself of. He pats her on the head and tells her to go home, essentially. She sort of hates him and the condescending look he sends her. She buys orange juice and swears she sees Tobin at the self checkout, she contemplates ducking into the cereal aisle to hide. Then she realises it's just a stranger in a snapback. Christen goes through the assisted checkout with two items and a developing headache she’s not convinced is related to the illness. 

Tobin has messaged her a total of three times since the game. It's been four weeks. Christen hasn’t opened any of them. She’d read the first from her lockscreen and put Tobin’s number onto Do Not Disturb immediately. If she knew how to, and she wasn’t so unwilling to be so unattached from her, she’d block her number. She could google how. She doesn’t. 

Monotony creeps back into her life like a warm blanket pulled to the shoulders. Outside, her windows rattle from a storm, but Christen types against the glow of her laptop screen until her eyes burn and her fingers ache. She takes a total of two days off work, not willing to take the role of Typhoid Mary, and decides that she needs to get on immunity boosters, because it's far too long to have nothing but email and tissues and the endless stream of social media on her phone to occupy herself with. Pinoe offers to drop soup by on her way to a meeting. Christen thanks her profusely but assures her she has it covered before throwing a bag of popcorn in the microwave for dinner.

She makes her grand return to work on a Thursday, dutifully covering her red nose and bleary eyes with layers of foundation and mascara. She doesn’t feel better, but she feels worse about staying at home alone than she does about coughing in the office. Her desk looks the same as it did when she left it half way through Monday when she felt like she couldn’t breathe and was seriously considering a trip to the ER. It's a comfort she needs as she settles behind her desktop and starts carding through the work that others had picked up the slack on, fixing errors until she begins to seriously question the competence of everyone at the firm. It's likely, in her sniffling state, that she makes even more mistakes.

Shiny shoes Todd makes stilted, too loud conversation with her over the printer. She smiles politely and listens to his thoughts on the NHL and how the Kings might have a chance this season as if she cares. Her chest is still rattling when she breathes and she can hardly speak through it, but he doesn’t seem to mind how one sided the conversation is. She takes her stack of paper and leaves him with a ‘see you’ before heading back to her desk, conscious not to think of the last thing Tobin had said to her. Paralegal Tara sits at their table in the break room at lunch and asks first how she’s feeling with a lip gloss laden but ultimately sympathetic smile, and second if she knows what Darren, their boss, was planning on doing about the Stevenson case. Christen ignores Jesse’s mumblings about how you would think she would know, since she’s sleeping with him. Christen still doubts its true, and she’s beginning to think Jesse should know better than risking someone's career with such a salacious and unfounded rumour. She doesn’t say anything to stop her, though, so maybe her moral standing is shaky. 

Christen misses Tobin’s world. She misses Tobin. She drinks her orange juice and takes her antibiotics and doesn’t let herself open any of her messages, doesn’t let herself need Tobin, no matter how much she’d like to. Even when she has to prop three pillows under her head to keep herself on enough of an angle that she doesn’t choke on the flem in her throat in her sleep. 

It’s not the first time Christen has had to look after herself by any means. She’d done it before she met Tobin, she’s done it since. She’d done it when Tobin was still around in a tangible way. When she’d been out of town and Christen wasn’t ok. They’d had half asleep facetime then, though. When Tobin had cared about her as an instinct rather than an afterthought. Christen knows how to take care of herself. She’s capable of it. She’s just not very good at putting it before the instinct to just roll over and let life - and chest infections- do their worst. 

She feels unwell and weak and switches her phone off to stop the part of her that held onto the string that tied them together long after her other hand had cut it from calling.

She shouldn’t have gone to work, that at least becomes clear. By the time the day is done, Christen is almost keeled over her desk, chest heavy and eyes burning. She needs sleep, but she doesn’t think she can move. She needs food and medication, but it's all at her house, and she isn’t sure she can get there alone. She longs for the days when being sick and missing a few days was an annoyance, rather than a dead end in her life. Jesse pats her head in an almost mocking way as she leaves, wishing her well, mumbling about maybe needing to go to the hospital. As if Christen hasn’t thought of that. Her breath rattles when she finally heaves herself up from her desk. She orders an Uber, hoping they’ll just accept having to sanitise every surface of their car as she loads her rattling cough into it. She leaves her car in the parking garage and decides she doesn’t have it in her to worry about what happens to it or how she’ll get to work tomorrow. 

By the time she stumbles out of the Uber, with a rasped thank you that earns her a nervous look from the driver, Christen feels like death. She’s about ready to throw herself onto the couch and let it swallow her whole. Let herself die right there all alone and wonder how long it will take anyone to notice. She doesn’t have dinner with Ali, Ashlyn and Megan for another three weeks and it wouldn’t be unusual for her to ignore communication from them for at least two of those. Not unusual enough to warrant a check up at least. None of her work friends really check up with her outside of her job. She’s already ignoring Tobin’s messages. They’d probably wonder why she hadn’t come into the office, but Christen had once gone two months before realising her colleague had quit, so she's not convinced the concern would be great enough for a call of the police for at least a few weeks. She’s not sick enough to have to be seriously concerned. She’s being dramatic, she knows, but she also knows with resounding clarity that it could be weeks before anyone knew Christen was dead. 

Wasn’t that a thought to die to. 

Christen falls face first onto her couch, still in her work clothes and the makeup that only barely conceals how awful she feels. She’s asleep almost the second she makes it to the pliant leather of the seat, no regard for anything but not having to spend her day trying to think while oxygen has to fight to get to her brain. 

She dreams in rich colours, a mosaic of real and imagined tragedies. Of the trees in Oregon and the purple wine of her wedding day and the orange of the sunset during her childhood and the deep blue she has painted herself with. She dreams of her mother's comforting touch and the terror of losing her. Of Tobin’s devastation when Christen yelled at her and her casual cruelty when she spoke back. She dreams and she dreams and she doesn’t feel better for it. 

She wakes at ten pm with a rattling cough and bile in a throat she can’t get air through and knows that this time her shoulders are too crushed under the weight of her world to look after herself. She’s not a doctor, but she knows she needs one. Even through the haze.

She doesn’t think she can get herself into an Uber a second time. Knows she can’t drive the car she’d left at the office. Knows even if it was in her own garage she’d drive it straight into a pole in her current state. Just as surely as she knows she needs to call someone, she knows she doesn’t have anyone to call. Jesse would more than likely text her back eight hours later saying ‘Are you good? Just saw this.’ An ambulance seems too dramatic. Megan is in Washington for a conference. Ali is - well, Christen doesn’t actually know why she can’t call Ali, but she bypasses her contact anyway. She’s sure there's an entirely valid, understandable reason that leads to her finger pressing down on Tobin’s contact instead of her friends. There's got to be. 

If there isn’t, then that would mean Christen maybe wants to be around Tobin a little more than she’s willing to admit to herself, and there’s absolutely no way that that's true. It's an impossibility. 

Christen has been ignoring Tobin since she did nothing strictly wrong four weeks ago at a football game Christen should have been smart enough to decline an invitation to. If she was Tobin, she’d probably decline the call. The phone only rings twice before she picks up, though. 

“Chris?” Tobin’s sleep riddled voice mumbles down the line. Christen should probably regret calling her. She means to regret it, she really does, but instead she feels a little warm and can’t help but be glad for her. 

“Tobes” it’s whispered, the syllables catching in her throat as she tries to get it out properly. There's a quick shuffling from the other end of the line and Christen exhales heavily as she shifts onto her back.

“Hey, are you okay?” Tobin sounds weary but concerned. Christen can almost picture the little wrinkle between her eyebrows. The way her eyes hood when she's being serious. It makes her smile under the deliriousness. 

“I don’t think so.” Christen coughs, letting her eyes fall shut. “I know you probably hate me now, but can you take me to the ER?” 

“Holy shit, Christen. Yeah.  _ Yeah _ . I don’t-” Tobin sounds flustered, and there's a bustling on the other end of the line. 

Christen imagines her tugging a hat over her head, pulling on her converse. The way she did when she was running really late, a piece of toast dangling from between her teeth, the crumbs falling against Christen’s cheek as she kissed her on her way out. Tobin sighs heavily, “What's your address, I’ll be right there.” 

She must fall asleep again, because she wakes up to the press of cool hands against her forehead. She can’t help but jerk away weakly. Christen hasn’t been coaxed awake so gently since her Mother died. The cool hand slips away and despite her earlier reaction she misses it instantly, a whine slipping past her lips, rather embarrassingly, as she moves her head as much as she can to chase after it. She blinks open blearily to find Tobins warm eyes shining down at her. 

It might be heaven. She really might have died. It could be hell. She might have lived. 

“The door was unlocked.” Tobin, who is possibly an angelic illusion conjured in the afterlife, but likely just her ex wife she called in an act of chest infection fuelled desperation, says in explanation. Her forehead is furrowed in concern, but a smile twitches her lips minisculely as she adds “Never thought I’d see the day.” 

Christen just blinks at her, mouth opening and closing as her brain tries to catch up. As her throat tries to remember words and how one goes about forming them. Tobin smells like spearmint and leather and Christen could easily collapse onto her and fall back asleep. Instead, she tracks her gaze over the wrinkles by her eyes that weren’t there before Christen left her and tries to focus on that instead of how much her chest aches. 

Tobin’s frown deepens. “Come on, let's get you to the hospital.”

If Christen is being entirely honest, she hardly remembers the trip to the ER. She knows that she sits in the passenger seat of Tobin’s car. Knows that Tobin helps her buckle up when she rests her head back against the headrest with no intention of moving. The car is new, shiny and smooth with red stitching in the leather. Christen likes it. She’s still driving the same, carefully maintained but hardly loved Toyota she’d driven out of Portland with half their bookshelf and a wilting pot plant in boxes in the backseat. 

Back before she and Tobin had ruined their future, before they’d collapsed a city that had taken a thousand years to build in a single day, she had read a lot of self help books. Books that encouraged taking time for oneself and centring your soul to the universe. They were beautiful, rich with sentiment that Christen had felt was accessible back then. When the world seemed unending and Tobin had been at most a phone call away. Now, Tobin sits in the seat next to her and Christen feels like the world has ended because of the impossibility of it. She took the books with her, hoping they’d have something in the way of advice on what to do when your partner fucking hates you, and for as much as you want them to weep and suffer, you still love them with sharp edges to your tenderness. 

Loving Tobin is evergreen. Any tree falls when you take a chainsaw to it, though. Loving Tobin is everlasting. That one she can’t counter. That one even her two hundred dollar an hour therapist can’t untangle the roots of, though Christen will lie until she's blue in the face to convince her she can. 

The waiting room smells too clean, burning itself into Christen’s senses, cutting off her supply of Tobin’s body wash from where she's lent against her, and yet, Christen still cringes at just how many germs there probably are. If it wasn’t for the fact that she cannot breathe, dammit, it would probably be all that she's focused on. The lighting is stark, slightly blue and far too bright for how late at night it is. It only contributes to the glaring headache Christen has from coughing her lungs out for three straight days. She feels like her brain is rattling against her skull every time she coughs, every time she draws a breath that ends up choked off in a cough. She’d like to sleep, and she lets her head loll against Tobin’s shoulder when she sits her down in the plastic seats.

There's a toddler running around across the room, digging through the toy box and chucking things around as she goes. Christen smiles loosely and watches her through hooded eyes, nestling her head into the soft fabric of Tobin’s t-shirt. She used to worry about how she would handle being a Mother, how she’d cope with the mess and disruption that seemed to trail after them. They would’ve been looking into options for children by now, sitting down and figuring out what the timeline on Tobin’s career was. Looking at the kid now, with her pony tails and flushed cheeks, Christen can’t help but be hit by how odd this all is. How odd it is that it became odd in the first place. That Tobin is anything but her constant companion in life, for better, for worse, as long as they both shall live.

She’s warm beside her, a pair of glasses pushed up to the bridge of her nose while she tries to fill in the paperwork the triage nurse had handed her when they arrived. Chewing on the end of the pen between questions. She jots down Christen’s birthdate and blood type without hesitation. She only questions her on exactly what her symptoms are, having her point to the boxes so she can tick them. Tobin cuts her a concerned look after she points to ‘trouble breathing’ and wraps an arm along the back of her chair, rubbing soothing circles into her back. If she wasn’t so oxygen deprived she’d probably think to tell Tobin to move a seat away so she doesn’t catch her just-a-chest-infection-don’t-worry. She can’t bring herself to be quite so self sacrificial, though, so she stays quiet and presses her head further against Tobin’s sternum. 

They sit in the waiting room for far, far too long to be reasonable. What feels like two years but is possibly no more than three hours. Christen tries to suggest Tobin goes home, but she just raises her eyebrows at her and grabs a magazine off the table in front of them, propping her feet up and settling back. Not leaving, then. Christen thinks, for as wrong as she knows it is, for as much as she knows, or should know, that it's impossible that Tobin really wants to be here, she could settle back into this kind of familiar comfort. If she could live in a forever of being close enough to death a long lost love gathers at her bedside out of guilt, she would. There isn’t much she wants more than Tobin without consequence. Perhaps that coffee machine in Portland, but, come to think of it, she thinks the coffee would taste wrong if it wasn’t brewed by Tobin, anyway.

When she was 21, Tobin had dropped onto both knees in front of her, while Christen was cocooned in a blanket on their couch, and asked Christen to love her for better or for worse. She had grinned sheepishly as she held up a diamond ring she’d bought with her newly promoted national team contract. Christen had felt like they’d gotten everything she ever wanted. She had loved her so much it burst out of her in peels of laughter when they were almost asleep, Tobin frowning at her with fond eyes as she asked what was so funny. Christen had just said ‘ _ you’ _ , and dissolved further into laughter as Tobin wrestled her back into the bed until the laughter was replaced with gasps. 

They had loved so ferociously it had almost been enough. Enough for Christen to take the diversion from her best laid plans. Enough for Tobin to look at her earnestly and say she wanted to settle down. Enough, until it wasn’t. But God, had they come close. It brushed by her fingers, grazing them with the cruelty of an almost and the unforgivable words they’d written on each other's death warrants. 

A nurse calls ‘Press’ into the churning silence of the waiting room, and Tobin helps her stagger to her feet, pulling her to the doors out of the linenum purgatory and into the emergency department. 

“And your relationship to the patient?” The nurse asks, glancing between them critically, hand on the door, not quite opening it. Tobin blanches, rubbing the back of her neck uncomfortably. 

“Oh. Uh-” 

“She’s my wife.” Christen interjects, voice rusty and strained, following the statement with a rattling cough. Tobin looks at her with wide eyes, and Christen thinks her stomach would flutter if she wasn’t so focused on figuring out how to make sure she keeps breathing through this goddamn chest. 

The nurse nods, though she glances at Tobin’s speculatively for a moment before jotting something down on her clipboard and waving them through the door she pushes properly open for them. Neither of them are wearing rings, but she supposes some couples don’t. Christen can’t stomach being alone in the bleach smelling room of a hospital. She just hopes that her ex won’t blow the fantasy. Won’t storm out with a ‘she’s your problem now’ and be done with it. 

Tobin’s gaze is intense, laden with something heavy. Something Christen isn’t ready to deal with. She’s not sure if Tobin hates her now, but she doesn’t want to find out in the very public corridors of the emergency room, and so she breaks the stare and focuses on following the nurse towards the beds. Tobin keeps one hand on her elbow to help guide her, though, so she’s probably not disgusted by Christen’s desperation, at least. Or maybe she just isn’t malicious enough to let her fall face first onto the hospital floor. All the falling they did had been flowery and metaphorical, after all, not the literal plummet into hard cement it had felt like. 

The nurse leaves Christen on a bed with scratchy sheets surrounded by paper thin curtains with a promise that the doctor will arrive soon. Tobin is left to fold her toned legs into the clearly uncomfortable chair next to the bed. Some absurd part of Christen wants to offer to switch, or at least let Tobin climb up onto the bed next to her. She doesn’t, because she hasn’t totally lost it, yet, but she does briefly consider it, and that should be an indicator that she is at the least well on her way to losing it. 

“They let in spouses.” Christen rasps instead, shrugging weakly against the bed. Tobin nods easily, lent back in her chair, eyes fixed on the nurses station across from them and its glowing screens. “I’m sorry. It was selfish-”

“I want to be here, Christen” Tobin interjects firmly. She doesn’t look at her, just keeps her eyes on the numbers on the monitor. Christens not sure what they’re really indicating. Just trusts that the actual medical professionals know what the hell is going on. Hopes that whatever doctor will be in to see her shortly is less of a pompous douchebag than the one who’d patted her on the head and told her not to worry when she told him she was concerned about the pneumonia she definitely now has. 

“You don’t really, though. You said-. You can leave… if you want.” Christen feels tired from both the effort of speaking, which is a generous term for the croak making its way past her lips, and from the conversation about the conversation they’ve never discussed since. 

She doesn’t want to discuss it now, really, but she’s a glutton for punishment, she supposes. That much became clear when she invited Tobin to dinner, when she accepted Tobin’s invitation. When she opened up her door and said ‘this is the tenuous tightrope I have walked since you destroyed my pathway, and here are a pair of scissors to slice it in half and ruin me all over again.’ 

“What are you talking about?” Tobin looks at her, eyebrows drawn low, eyes calculating. Christen swallows around the flem in her throat. She has to know. She has to. 

“You said I wasn’t worth the effort. When we were married.” Christen says. “I am not under illusions here. You don’t care about me. Don’t save my feelings.”

“ _ Chris _ ” she breathes, face crumbling, voice going with it as her chest heaves.

She looks wrecked, a wounded look in her eye. Christen recognises the look from the day Christen had told her that their marriage was doomed because neither of them cared about the other enough. Recognises it from her own face in the mirror propped against the wall in their living room that reflected Christen back at herself when Tobin had shrugged and said ‘you’re not worth the effort, anymore, Chris.’ 

“I didn’t mean that, alright? It was complicated.” She says it with a ferocity this time. The kind of ferocity with which they’d once told each other that they’d love one another forever. Christen has learnt not to fully trust it, but she leans against it anyway. Tobin’s expression is one of resolve, Christen thinks she can trust that. “It’s still complicated, but I am  _ not _ leaving.”

The doctor brushes the curtain open and grins at them lecherously before Christen can call her on her lie or allow herself to forgive, and she’s grateful for the interruption, letting her head fall back against the bed while Tobin chews on her lip. It turns out that Christen, in her constant genius, was correct in the assumption of her diagnosis. Its minor pneumonia developed from a particularly vicious chest infection. The doctor tells her she’s wrong in the belief that it’ll kill her, though. 

She’s carted off for a chest x-ray, and Tobin is left sitting in the uncomfortable chair with nothing but a half flat phone to entertain her. Christen closes her eyes and imagines a world where everything is as it should be. Where she never met Tobin, or she never left her, or she never came back. Where her Mum is alive, and they have dinner once a week. Where Christen has friends she tells everything and never feels bitter over flowers of all things. She imagines and imagines and imagines until she falls back asleep, a drip in her veins, antibiotics cursing her system, and Tobin, real world where everything went wrong Tobin, by her side. 

She doesn’t dream. There are no bright colours, or dark ones. No phantom Tobin’s shoving her and her book bag out of the front door or pulling her in after a long day. Instead, there is a quiet hum in the background of her brain. A little like a lullaby. It reminds her ever so slightly of how Tobin would whistle while she worked when she was particularly happy. Singing as she dried the dishes or poured herself a glass of water after a day well lived. 

Doctors bustle her, and she’s half lucid for temperature checks and murmured conversations, for someone coaxing water down her throat. She feels the world fly beneath her feet as her bed is wheeled to a room instead of the crowded emergency beds where an old man is yelling bloody murder and a child, not the one from the waiting room, but a little boy, crying as if the world has ended. She hears her heartbeat monitor vaguely. It feels half imagined in her sleep riddled state. The hand that clutches hers and the whispered prayer of her name is certainly imagined. 

When she wakes, Tobin is still there, head in her hands, shoulders stiff. It's not a sweet sight, but Christen is just happy to see her and she smiles regardless of the circumstance. 

“Morning” She mumbles, half into her pillow, throat aching. Tobin jerks up, hands dropping from her hair, running across her face when she sees Christen looking back at her. 

Tobin gives her a weak smile. “It's like, four am. Not morning.”

Christen smiles back, rolling her head to look up at the ceiling. Her chest feels only slightly clearer, her throat raw and head still pounding a little from the coughing and congestion. It's still an improvement. It gives her time to think, and maybe regret, a little. 

“I am sorry if it made you uncomfortable.” She says. Tobin hums in question, eyebrows furrowing in confusion, but her face remains open and calm. “Saying we were married.”

“I don’t think I’ve been comfortable since you stopped saying it.” Tobin says, contemplatively. She sighs heavily, like something weighted is holding her to the chair. Denying her the easy exit Christen is only just beginning to convince herself Tobin doesn’t want after all.

Christen watches her carefully. She wants to rid Tobin of that resigned slump of her shoulders, but her chest feels a little like it's caving in. She’s not entirely convinced it's attributable to the infection alone. She doesn’t know what to do with something so raw as that. 

It’s possible that they’re the only two people in the world who will ever really understand the molecular change that occurred five years ago. Christen is struck by just how well Tobin gets her. Even in this, even on their man made islands, thousands of emotional miles apart and adrift from their homeland, Tobin is right by her side, sending smoke signals to say she understands. That she’s the only one that understands. They’ve been caught in the wind for years, breezing right by Christen in wisps. The smoke is darkening though, signalling danger, signalling that someone else is left alive in all of this.

Christen’s chemistry began to change when she and Tobin stopped talking. It was altered permanently when they spoke again only for Tobin to tell her she wasn’t worth it and for Christen to imply that she didn’t care about Tobin, or whether or not she had slept with that girl on the road. As if that could ever be true. As if she cared about anything else back then. Christen cared so much, and she still wasn’t sure what she believed. That was the problem. When she left, she’d spilled the beakers all over the apartment floor. When she left, she’d left behind every non essential function, her heart staining the carpet and brain chemistry splattering the wall as she clicked the door behind her. Tobin kept everything. 

“Get some rest, Chris. I’ll be here when you wake up,”

“Pinky promise?” Christen isn’t sure what possesses her to say it, but it makes Tobin break into a grin, so she can’t find it within herself to regret it. She holds her pinky out between them. Tobin watches it for a second, until Christen shakes it impatiently, and she wraps her own around it with a shake of her head.

“Yeah. Pinky promise.” Tobin is smiling properly at her, eyes shining even in the deluge of the hospital room. The orange glow of a sunrise that's imminent but not yet ready to arrive illuminating the room through the window. It reflects in Tobin’s eyes, Christen thinks it might be in hers as well.

“Can’t break those.” Christen mumbles, already half asleep and only somewhat coherent. Tobin laughs breathily.

“Go to sleep.” 

“Love you.” Christen is practically asleep as it falls from her lips, the phrase so familiar, even after so long, its muscle memory to say. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t mean it. She just can’t afford to let herself give herself over to it. At that, she would surely drown.

She’s too deep into the clutches of sleep to know if she imagines the hitch in Tobin’s breath and the exhaled ‘love you too.’ She lets the warmth of it pull her the rest of the way into unreachable sleep, regardless. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come chat: softnoirr.tumblr.com


	5. On purpose, I am going to care about you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I just want someone to grab my little face and scream "ON PURPOSE, ON PURPOSE I AM GOING TO CARE ABOUT YOU" - Jenny Slate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questionable recovery times from pneumonia, very real names for Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavour. This chapter has it all.  
> We're officially at the mid way point. Put on your seatbelts. No spoilers but enjoy the softness now.

Christen knows the flavour of regret intimately. Knows the led like hold on her tongue, the name pressed against her lips, the churning of her stomach like an ocean on a grey day. It lines her teeth and weighs on her tongue the second she wakes. It's something that has sat in her mouth every day for years. It was there the morning she left Portland. There the first morning she woke up without Tobin and knew that that feeling would be her new alarm clock. There the second the words of accusation that had forever ruined them left her mouth. There everyday and every night, smoothed over now and again by the taste of vodka or distractions, but lingering at the edges, always. 

It's the sound of the news blaring from the TV that wakes her, but the regret makes a case for itself, biting at her with sharp teeth as she’s roused from sleep. They’d discharged her from the hospital after two nights of observation and the removal of an IV from her arm. Christen curses the condescending doctor who told her she was fine to hell and back. She thinks she might send him a cake with ‘did you even graduate medical school?’ iced on it in big pink letters. 

Tobin had driven her home, and then Tobin hadn’t gone to her own home. 

She runs an itinerary of herself in her head. Checks that all her organs are intact, that it’s her own couch she’s lying on, cocooned in her own duvet, covered in her own sweat. Her own chipped mug with long cold ginger tea. Christen isn’t quite content, she’s tangled in the doona cover, and she needs to shave her legs, her chest is still a little weary, and there are patches of the last few days that she doesn’t remember. Her head feels a thousand times clearer, antibiotics seeming to have finally done their job. There is an overwhelming peace that has settled in her, though. It’s bone deep, right down to the marrow. It's not just from the languid nature of her muscles post illness, either. She feels grounded, like a plane landed after a 15 hour flight plagued by turbulence. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise when she blinks herself into a conscious enough state to find Tobin half curled up against her side. Her hair is knotted and she looks tired, deep circles under her eyes. Christen had insisted she go home every time they were both awake at the same time in the ER but she’d been resolved to play nurse. Say what you like about Tobin, and Christen could write novels of all the things she’d said, both sweepingly romantic and cruelly unforgiving, but she was stubborn to a fault. Once she’d resolved to do something, she did it. Christen couldn’t have stomached waking up to antiseptic all alone, though, so she’s grateful. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise, and if it wasn’t she thinks that she would leave Tobin to get some sleep. She looks like she needs it. But it is, and she jerks quickly away, jolting Tobin’s head off her ribs and into the couch cushion between them. 

Tobin groans, blinking awake slowly, despite what should have been a shock to the system. Christen remembers Kelley waking them up with a bucket of water, once. Christen had sat bolt upright and screamed bloody murder. Tobin had wiped her face with the back of her hand with hardly any other reaction, shaking her head and mumbling ‘dude, come on’ at a cackling Kelley. They’d been younger than they had any right to be, in their first apartment, playing house, shared with friends, playing at having a clue how to build a life without rotten floorboards. 

This time, Tobin doesn’t mumble ‘dude’ and roll back over to go to sleep with a kiss to Christen’s temple. Instead, she pushes herself up onto her elbows and blinks at Christen, whispering a sheepish “Sorry.” 

Christen nods at her, the tension that had come so suddenly ebbing away just as quickly at the hesitant smile on Tobin’s face. There's a number of reasons Christen packed up and left while Tobin wasn’t home five years ago, like a thief in the night. Not insignificant is that she was well aware of her weakness for Tobin’s smile. She never would’ve left if Tobin had walked through the door with a grin like everything was right in the world, as she was want to do. 

“You back in the land of the living?” Tobin asks, clearing her throat and running a hand through her hair as she sits up properly. She’s still wearing her Converse, red, with the laces in a weird knot but otherwise spilling all over the place.

Once, Christen had knelt down beside her and tied her laces carefully and meticulously. Tobin had snorted, mumbled that she knew how to tie her own shoes. She’d smoothed her hand over Christen’s head and kissed her in thanks, anyway. She misses that. She misses the gentleness of acting out your love without hesitation. 

“Yeah. I guess.” She says, clearing her throat around the words that come out rusty from disuse. Tobin hums, running a hand through her hair. Christen doesn’t wonder what it means that Tobin knows she’s feeling better based on her rejection of her touch. She doesn’t wonder about anything at all. 

“Want some toast?” Tobin asks. She smiles, so Christen says yes, and she smiles a little wider at that, long rows of teeth appearing, and Christen remembers how she got here in the first place.

Tobin has never been in Christen’s house. Christen hardly allows even a glimpse of her memory to seep into the walls. She’d spent more money than she really should have at Ikea when she moved out here to make sure her furniture had never been touched by her. She’d bought new sheets, burnt the ones she’d taken from Portland when she rolled over one night and found them covered in the smell of Tobin’s shampoo. 

She’s never been here, never even slipped through the cracks, but standing in the middle of her kitchen, following the line of the toaster’s cord to try and figure out which plug it's in, Christen feels as if she’s been here the whole time. As if she never left.

It makes her feel a little sick. She might not be able to keep the toast down under the weight of it. 

Tobin’s wearing track pants, baggy around her knees with a Thorns crest on the pocket. Christen used to wear pairs like it, the ones with ‘17’ written down the side, whenever she missed her. She’s got glasses pressed up her nose and she looks exactly like she’d been dragged to the ER to watch her ex cough her lungs up for days straight. Christen doesn’t know what Tobin does with her life these days, but she can’t imagine it's usually that. She feels a little guilty, and supremely regretful. She should’ve called Ali. She’s not sure how to go about being indebted to Tobin. 

The piece of toast lathered in peanut butter she had to swing open half the cupboards to find Tobin hands her with a big grin a few moments later only destabilises the score further. Because Tobin doesn’t belong in that kitchen. She hasn’t always been there. She wasn’t ever supposed to know what her kitchen looks like. Christen wants her to stay forever without ever speaking. Wants to freeze her like Medusa and keep all the warmth she brings without any of the burn. 

She takes a bite of the toast and looks away. It’s golden on each side but still tastes like bread in the centre, exactly the way Christen likes it. Exactly the way she never has time to be careful enough to make it when she’s leaving in the morning. 

“I am really sorry.” Christen says, chewing her toast delicately, eyes fixed just past Tobin, who has settled back onto the couch, now with a place between them. Tobin quirks an eyebrow over her own toast.

“It's fine, Chris.” She says, nonchalantly, a slight shrug raising her shoulders before settling back into the couch. Christen wishes Tobin would stop acting as if her life hasn’t been completely uprooted five times over. 

“No, it's not. And I’m sorry. I’ll call an ambulance or something next time.” She says it with as much finality as she can muster, but it’s still weak. 

Christen is out of practice with repenting out loud. She hasn’t been to confession since a week before their wedding. She hasn’t allowed herself to express her sorrow since she decided her therapist had to be bored with the narrative already and resolved to go back to talking about nothing of substance and the merits of music therapy. Or maybe Tobin is still just as unbothered by authority, because she doesn’t seem deterred in the least.

Her lips twitch in a smirk and she shakes her head, “Chris, it’s good, yeah? You don’t need to get an ambulance. I’ve got a car and you’ve got my number. I am happy to look out for you.”

Christen wants so badly to believe her. Wants to engage in this fantasy she’s let herself buy back into. Where Tobin catches her and Chriten accepts the fall. She can’t break her own back for it again, though. Can’t let herself take another crash landing. She’s so tired of this. So tired of trying not to drown when all she wants to do is let herself sink. She doesn’t need Tobin to be her lifeguard, she just wants to learn to breathe under the weight of the waves. 

“That's not your responsibility anymore, Tobin.” Christen snaps, clutching the edge of her plate until her knuckles go white. Tobin freezes from her end of the couch, swallowing her toast thickly. There’s crumbs around her lips, and Christen thinks it’s a little unfair how easy it is for Tobin to lie in her domesticity. How easy it is for her to look settled in rooms she’s never going to stay in. 

Christen’s engagement ring is sitting in a compartment of her jewelry box that holds nothing else but a pair of earrings that were too heavy to wear. The only one she doesn’t see regularly. She’d taken it with her when she left Portland for reasons she couldn’t explain even then. It had felt like another limb, she wasn’t ready to give up on it. She thinks Tobin probably would’ve mailed it back to her if she tried to leave it, anyway. Would’ve insisted on her keeping the one last ghost of their relationship. Would’ve insisted she be haunted by the broken promises for as long as the diamond lasted. She flirts with the idea of going to get it now, putting it in Tobin’s hand and sending her packing. A diamond she can pawn off in thanks for not letting Christen die alone. It was a strange interpretation of the promise they’d made, but it's one fulfilled now, and they can be done.

Instead, she heaves a sigh and cuts her eyes away from her bedroom door. She’ll mail it, that way there's less confrontation. She doesn’t have Tobin’s address, but she’ll figure it out, and then Tobin will slip up and say something mean instead of the sweet things she’s said so far, and Christen will be safe in her resentment, and she can go back to wading through concrete and remembering to breathe. Soon, things will be muted again, and she won’t have to worry so much.

“Right. Well, I like, care, so. I am gonna do it even if I am not obligated to.” Tobin says, because she has no regard for Christen’s denialism, her eyebrows furrowed and eyes clear and insistent as they stare her down. She blinks back in surprise.

She had half expected Tobin to roll her eyes and walk away muttering something like ‘be that way, then.’ She had never been much for antagonism, leaving whenever the water started to boil. Christen had never quite been able to step away from the panel of Tobin’s buttons without pushing at least one when she was upset. It was almost a miracle they hadn’t self-destructed far earlier. 

Christen doesn’t really know Tobin anymore, though. Maybe she met someone who managed to get her into the therapy Christen asked relentlessly for her to attend. Maybe she’d met someone who actually talked about her feelings with her, who Tobin actually wanted to communicate with. Maybe Tobin just communicates better when she doesn’t love someone. In all the things Christen had questioned, she’d never doubted that Tobin had loved her, she just hadn’t cared all that much to do anything with it. And now she was promising she cared, but she no longer loved Christen. The world had the cruelest humour, and her heart was a sadist in its affections. 

She always wanted for her to care, really, truly care. Care enough to show up. Care enough to follow her when she left. She didn’t and she hadn’t and this isn’t enough. It’s nine years too late for Christen to have the life she wanted back. It's everything she wanted to hear and Christen smiles numbly over the mess they’ve made of it all. 

She wants to tell Tobin to let her suffer in peace, let her hate the version of her in her head, but she thinks Tobin would listen if she did, so she just nods slowly and finishes her toast. Tobin smiles into her own plate. 

“Hey, did you get like, robbed or something, because your car isn’t in the driveway.” Tobin asks after a moment of heavy silence, glancing around first like she’s searching for something to comment upon.

“I left it at work. I’ll have to Uber on Monday, or whatever.” Christen says when she finishes chewing. It's a Saturday. Somewhere among the chaos, in one of her more lucid moments, she’d emailed her boss to let him know she was in the hospital and wouldn’t be able to come in on Friday. She thinks she remembers Tobin laughing at her for it. Her car is still locked in the parking garage, though, and she’ll have to get a lift to work tomorrow unless she finds a way to get it back now.

“I could give you a lift now?” Tobin suggests, and she’s mostly neutral, but there's a glint of excitement in her eyes that betrays her. Christen doesn’t dwell on it, just nods and places both of their plates in the dishwasher before heading off to get dressed. 

She wants Tobin to let her wander the ruins of her life in peace, but she supposes this could be fine for a while. Playing pretend is easier than wallowing, after all. Christen’s penchant for confusing reality and fiction is a dangerous variable to throw into play. She does it anway. The city is already rubble, where else is there to go but up? 

*

Christen goes back to work on Monday, shoulders her way past placating ‘are you ok?’s and shiny shoes Todd’s attempts at pity. Jesse brushes a hand over her forehead sympathetically and Christen grits her teeth a little when her clammy thumb rubs against her eyebrow. It all comes off a little disingenuous and only serves to remind Christen why she's spent most of her time at this firm waiting for the next job offer to come in. 

She buries herself in her work, catches up on even more missed emails, fixes the mistakes she’d made in her chest infection riddled haze. She drinks the bad coffee from the break room and makes polite conversation with one of the interns who has been victimised by one of the junior partners since the day he arrived. Christen pats the kids arm sympathetically when he’s called over for more work. She remembers her early days in offices like this. She’d been full of so much fire, so much dedication to make the world better. Full of raw talent and loaded with a legal dictionary of a vocabulary. She still has both, but they lack the gusto of before, channeled into cases she doesn’t care for the outcome of. The world, her colleagues and her own mistakes had made sure of her decline. Her grad school friend Crystal specialises in dog bites, making everyone who has ever been too close to their neighbours dog as much money as possible. Christen thinks she should be grateful that at least she isn’t stuck in that department.

Last they’d spoken, Crystal had had a husband who’s madly in love with her and held a genuine joy in every second of her work, though. A real prospect of moving up, being made partner at a big name firm in New York. Getting paid millions to win dog bite cases isn’t so bad when everything else goes right. Christen isn’t quite her polar opposite. Not everything has gone wrong. Things have just been one long flat line since coming down from the spike that was Tobin.

She resolves not to think about anymore. Decides to listen to the ‘hang in there’ kitten poster on the wall of the breakroom and bury her head back in her work. Her Mum used to tell her to get out of her head and live in the sunshine a little more. There’s not all that much sunshine in the grey slog of the building that is her office, but a little streams through the window, and she thinks that’ll do for the time being. For as long as they’re still stuck in this chapter, it's okay if the sun only comes in snippets. 

Christen succeeds in not thinking about it so completely that it takes Jesse knocking her knuckles against her desk to get her to look up. She shoots her an annoyed look at first. They share an office, along with one of the other barristers, which is not exactly in the painting of Christen’s ideal life, but she had come to peace with it upon realising nothing else in the painting had turned out right, so why not this. Jesse is typically slightly more respectful of how much Christen loathes being interrupted, though. She’s about ready to snap at her when Jesse nods her head at the door with a pointed roll of her eyes, and Christen looks and finds Tobin hesitating on the threshold, Tupperware container in hand. 

And. Well. _Oh_. 

They haven’t really spoken since Tobin dropped her by her car on Saturday morning. Not beyond a few texts of gratitude and a thumbs up emoji. It had involved Christen finally opening the texts she’d been ignoring, which had involved a ‘hey good to see you’ and a ‘did i do something wrong??’ along with a message that was just her name and about a thousand question marks. Well, it was more like three, but Christen has never understood using more than one at a time, and so anything beyond that seems excessive. They had made guilt churn in her stomach, and she had closed her phone on the thread to avoid even thinking about sending another long winded apology. 

They haven’t spoken, and Christen hasn’t thought about it, deliberately hasn’t given any weight to the conversations she’s hoping Tobin’s forgotten or disregarded, and yet, here she is. She’s wearing loose fitting shorts and what looks like a far too expensive t shirt, her hair properly done. Here she is.

She hesitates in the door, adjusting her grip on the bright orange Tupperware, and Christen wants her to choose. Wants her to step surely through the door and mean it, explain herself and take a seat as if she has no reason to pause. As if neither of them do. Or turn away and answer none of Christen’s questions. Instead, she lingers on the edges and looks at Christen with a hesitation Christen isn’t familiar with.

Christen smiles, she thinks it must falter at the edges, but she does her best. “Tobin, hi.”

Tobin grins, characteristically lazy but happy, and steps through the door, letting it click carefully behind her. She cuts Jesse an unsure smile. Jesse just blinks back. 

“I, uh, brought you lunch.” She says, all crinkly eyed smiles, and god if Christen doesn’t feel like a 16 year old in a pencil skirt. She grins so widely her cheeks ache. Jesse’s eyebrows are up to her hairline, but Jesse has been getting on Christen’s last goddamn nerve lately, so she just swivels in her chair enough that she's out of her eye line. 

“Thank you.” Christen squeaks, because she doesn’t totally know what to do with that. She’d planned on maybe getting a sandwich from the deli a block over if she got the chance. The Tupperware that looks like it has chicken soup with the good noodles, the name brand ones, in it is a welcome diversion. 

Tobin places it on the edge of her desk tentatively, like she isn’t quite sure how close she’s allowed to get. The whole act would be unnervingly intimate if it wasn’t for how supremely comfortable Tobin looks. For the fact that she’s cutting looks at Christen like she might be yelled at at any second. Which would be a little insulting, except that Christen remembers their history, too. It’s also entirely possible she might have snapped at her if she’d looked too comfortable in the action, so she supposes she can’t begrudge Tobin her hesitance. 

“That’s really nice.” Christen says, staring at the container but not reaching out to take it. Tobin rubs the back of her neck shyly. She used to do that when people teased her about having feelings for Christen while she was around. Back before they’d even kissed. When half their college was rooting for them but neither had managed to take that final step. 

“It’s Dad’s recipe, so. Don’t think I messed it up, but you can totally toss it if it's awful.” She shrugs, demurely. 

Christen would think she’s being falsely humble, but she's eaten her attempts at cooking. Not that Christen is all that much better, but she can follow a recipe without flames and swearing. Tobin had once put tinfoil in the microwave when they were trying to cook dinner and argue at the same time. It hadn’t helped the fight, but it had forced them to order take away that night, which Christen had secretly considered a plus. 

She wonders if she’d shared that thought, if Tobin would have broken her seething silence and laughed with her. If they could’ve cut through the tension with laughter and lazy smiles and whispered apologies rather than divorce papers and thrown plates. Perhaps Tobin would’ve just scowled at her, assumed she was being made fun of, only escalating the argument. That was probably why Christen hadn’t said it. Tobin’s in front of her now, and there's a desk between them, but Christen feels the edges of the trust that was lacking back then tell her that Tobin probably would have liked it if she’d said it then. That maybe the desk wouldn’t be there if she had. She could say it now, she supposes, but Jesse is glancing between them like it's an episode of The Bachelor, so she shakes off the maybe. 

“No, Tobe, it's really _nice_. I appreciate it.” She says, instead. Tobin twitches but there's something like a smile on her lips. It gets tucked behind Tobin’s hand when she scratches at her nose. 

“Yeah, well, it's what you do, you know?” Tobin says. Christen doesn’t know, has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about or what her intent could possibly be, but she accepts it with a grateful smile anyway. “I better go, but, like, enjoy”

Tobin waves awkwardly as she backs out of the door. She moves as if to shove her hands in her pockets before realising she doesn’t have any. Christen smiles at her with reservation, unsure exactly what world she lives in where Tobin Heath stumbles through her door and brings her soup. Unsure exactly what to do with the way her heart seizes at it. Tobin disappears out the door, and Christen watches through the glass paneling as she hurries down the hallway and out of sight. 

Jesse turns to her with an expectant smirk and Christen flips her off, turning back to her desktop and annotations without entertaining a single question. 

*

It becomes a habit, and Christen should know better. She really, really should. She’s learnt this lesson. She learnt it with Tobin. She learnt it when Christen shirked her touch and learnt it as Tobin conjured such careless poison at her when they tried to discuss things. She’s learnt it with the girl she’d dated for two months a year and a half after she left Portland. The one who told her to get in therapy before disappearing from her life. They had been barely dating, and Christen had seized up when she called her her girlfriend, turned her back on her when she said things that sounded like affection, and waited for her to turn harsh, waited long enough, which wasn’t all that long, until she did. She was the only girl since Tobin that had been anything more than no strings, no feelings sex on the Thursday of a rough week. 

She should know better than to begin to expect to see Tobin rap her knuckles against her office door. Should know better than to get used to the sight of Tobin, still in training gear, lent against the door with Tupperware and a beaming grin. She certainly shouldn’t get into the habit of taking home the Tupperware, washing it, and swapping it for the new container. Christen almost can’t believe Tobin actually owns Tupperware. That had always been more her forte. 

What feels like a lifetime ago now, they had perused the aisle of homegoods stores and Target to stock their kitchen. Tobin riding the trolley and whistling while Christen checked off her list in one hand and double checked the brand names she wanted on her phone in the other. What Christen wouldn’t do to go back and watch Tobin with a smile. To live in a moment she knows now was so fleeting in its simplicity. Why she complicated things that were allowed to be not much more than the thrill of learning how to care for the person you love and yourself in equal measure, she’s not sure. She doesn’t want Tobin anymore, at least, she can’t afford to believe that she might, but she wishes she’d paid attention when she’d had her. She supposes you just don’t know those things at 22. She supposes she only knows them now for her failure to realise back then. 

It’s a habit that she should no better then, and it's one that's sinfully easy to fall back into. Tobin is no chef, but she stays basic, and it's good. Made better by the fact that it's delivered with a soft word and a nonchalant shrug, like Tobin has no ultiter motive. Christen would like to believe that's true. She’s mostly just resolved to not think about it too much. Tobin is excited when she drops off the bolognaise she’s been working on perfecting, and sends back about a thousand smiley faces when Christen texts her later to say it was good. 

Christen vaguely mentions during the third week of lunch drop offs that she needs to go to the hardware store on the weekend because one of her light bulbs has blown. That Friday, Tobin shows up on her doorstep with a sheepish smile, a shopping bag filled with light bulbs in one hand and a toolbox in the other. Christen does not know when Tobin decided to pursue a career in being a handyman, but she lets her in anyway.

“I didn’t know what kind of lights you had so…” Tobin shrugs, gesturing with the frankly obscenely full bag. Christen can’t help herself, she bursts into laughter right there on the spot. 

If she thinks about it too much, it's scary, and intense, and a whole lot of things Christen isn’t ready for. If she thinks about it too much, it's like peeling bandages off a scabbing off wound and inviting your assailant and their knife but into your space. If she thinks about it too much, she should shove Tobin back out the front door and tell her to fuck off, just as Tobin should do to her. But the thing is, if Christen neglects all that, a skill she has finely tuned, if she doesn’t think about it too much, something she’s less talented in, well. It's ridiculous. Tobin is ridiculous. And she honestly can’t help but lean against her kitchen counter and laugh when Tobin empties the bag to reveal every brand of light bulbs known to man. 

Luckily, Tobin seems to also recognise the absurdity of it, because she joins Christen in her laughter. Rests her forehead against the marble counter of Christen’s kitchen and laughs, shoulders shaking. Christen feels like a kid, and it only makes her laugh harder. They laugh until their stomachs ache. Tobin changes the light bulb Christen directs her to and after she’s done, they split a pint of Ben and Jerrys on the couch. 

They sit on opposite ends of the couch, but Tobin’s knee brushes against Christen’s toes, Tobin’s legs spread lazily and Christen’s feet curled up under her. It’s painfully familiar and it almost sets Christen back off again, so she buries her grin in another spoonful of ice cream. They watch _Friends_ and Christen curls her toes against the smooth skin of Tobin’s knee. She thinks Tobin might smile, but she sets her attention firmly enough on the TV that she can’t be sure.

“I can’t believe this show went on for so long.” Tobin mumbles halfway through their second episode. Neither of them had said anything when Christen pressed the next episode button, Tobin simply settling back against the couch and wrapping an arm across her stomach easily. 

Christen frowns at her. “It's _Friends_. It's iconic.” 

“I know.” Tobin snorts. “I just mean, like, didn’t they wanna move on?” 

Christen’s eyebrows shoot up so fast she probably looks like a cartoon character. Tobin had once told her she was going to be buried on a football pitch after dying mid play because they’d have to drag her from the pitch before they ever got her to stop. In a darker moment, she’d said ‘football is my life, Christen. It’s my everything.’ Point is, Tobin is one to speak on the concept of moving on. Not that Christen is much better, given the presence of her ex-wife on her couch, but that isn’t the point. 

“That's a little hypocritical, Tobes” Christen says, because she can’t help herself. The look Tobin gave her suggests she had seen her raised eyebrows and was expecting an explanation, anyway. 

Tobin clears her throat, and Christen has half a mind to apologise, wincing at her own indelicacy, before Tobin straightens and stares dead at the screen, saying “I am retiring, actually. End of this season.” 

Christen cannot be held responsible for the ‘holy shit’ that falls out of her mouth immediately. Intellectually, she knew that Tobin’s claims of planning on dying during a match were probably 90% dramatisation and she would, at some point, hang up the boots. They’d discussed it as part of Christen’s plans for them. She just, well, she sort of assumed she would be playing well into her late thirties. Kind of assumed that Christen's departure from her life meant a later retirement, not an earlier one. That once the only person requesting she stop was gone she’d be free to play until she really couldn’t anymore. Christen saw her play not three months ago. She knows there's no ‘have to’ involved in this decision. 

There's a smirk that tweaks Tobin’s lips at Christen’s outburst, but her jaw is tense, her eyes still fixed on the screen in front of her. Christen pushes the pint of ice cream into her hand and Tobin takes it without hesitation. 

“That’s good?” Christen isn’t sure if Tobin thinks it is. Isn’t sure how to navigate this conversation as an ex-wife-sort-of-friend-whose-lightbulbs-you-change rather than as a partner. Isn’t totally sure she’d know how to handle it even as the latter. Tobin glances at her, a more genuine smile pulling her lips in amusement. “Right?”

“Yeah, it’s good. It's time.” Tobin nods, pushing the spoon in and out of the ice cream and swirling it around. Christen sort of wants to grab her hands to make her stop, because she’ll turn it into soup, and it's a communal dessert and there's an implied respect to that which involves not turning it into soup. Also, she thinks maybe she should grab her hand as a gesture of comfort, but that feels wrong as an ex-wife-sort-of-friend-whose-lightbulbs-you-change. She keeps both hands in her lap.

“Ok. Good. Congrats.” Christen says. Tobin nods, hums low in her throat and keeps stirring the ice cream. 

“I’ve been, uh, thinking a lot. About what I want. What matters, like, actually matters, and I guess football isn’t really that for me anymore.” Tobin says, nose scrunching up and head tilting in consideration as she speaks. “Like, football was my first love, but it’s not it for me.” 

“I guess you’ve just got to find what you care about more than football.” Christen says. It's the same thing she used to say years ago, when they were plotting out their plans for the future, when Tobin wondered aloud what she’d possibly do with her life without a ball at her feet. 

“Kinda already have.” Tobin says, her stirring of the ice cream finally stopping. She looks Christen dead in the eye then, and the breath freezes in Christen throat, stomach clenching. Tobin looks focused in a way Christen has rarely seen on her.

“Yeah?” she asks, her voice comes out low. Tobin looks at her under her lashes, and Christen swears her blood pressure plummets. 

“Yeah. It’s why I came to LA.” Tobin’s eyes flicker across every inch of her face. Christen tries to keep her expression even, but whatever Tobin was looking for, she seems to find, because she nods minesculary and settles back into her seat, eyes returning to the screen. “By the way, I really hate Ross.” 

“Oh my god, I know.” Christen says in a rush, eyes snapping back to the screen, breath a little shallow.

Christen takes the ice cream back from Tobin and shoves a spoonful into her mouth. Her shoulders are tense and her heart is erratic, and she’s not thinking about why. She isn’t even considering any possible explanation for any of those things. She’s watching _Friends_ , even if the screen is a little blurry and her eyes are honestly more fixed on the patch of wall to the left of the TV. As far as she is concerned these things simply don’t exist.

She’s not thinking about it for even one second, but she smiles a little too widely into the pint of ‘Unfudge our Future’ Ben and Jerrys ice cream to be proportionate to the comedy level of _Friends_. It probably doesn’t mean anything. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come chat: softnoirr.tumblr.com


	6. Hard to be at a party (when I feel like an open wound)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And it's hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound  
> It's hard to be anywhere these days when all I want is you  
> You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town"  
> \- this is me trying, Taylor Swift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one step forward, two steps back. 
> 
> Don't yell at me it has a purpose, I promise.

As much as the world that Christen fundamentally understands has fallen from its axis and gone barreling towards incomprehensible, things don’t change all that much. Christen goes about her life. She ignores Jesse’s bitchy comments but enjoys the easiness of her presence. She wins a case and gets a nice email of encouragement from her boss. She goes home, she cleans her floors, she makes dinner, she goes to bed. She acts like an adult who knows, with some certainty, what they’re doing. She doesn’t feel like it, but she’d learnt some time ago that adulthood was largely a misalignment of emotion and action. It’s not exactly a positive understanding, but it works.

The only difference is that when Jesse makes a particularly absurd comment, Christen texts it in quotations to Tobin, who responds with ‘LOL’ and an emoji that her phone only occasionally recognises. When she wins her case, she texts Tobin, and she comes over with a bottle of champagne. She used to text Ali for that, but she’s likely busy anyway. Christen hasn’t asked, but she assumes. She puts on a playlist when she cleans and checks her phone for something other than making sure her alarm is set when she goes to bed. 

Tobin goes out of town for a week. She doesn’t say where she’s going, but Christen assumes it's Portland. Something to do with a development squad. For as much as they talk, there are some things they don’t speak about for a reason. The fact that Christen had spent the last two months of their relationship picking fights over the degree to which she despised Portland and the fact that Tobin had dragged her there, before disappearing like a thief in the night, the only indication she’d ever been there being the divorce papers left on the counter, is probably one of them.

Christen still doesn’t know why she said those things. Tobin doesn’t bring them up, though. So she lets the past stay where it is and carries on with her day. 

Tobin announces her return to LA by showing up on Christen’s doorstep with a bag of groceries and a long winded story about the man sitting in front of her on the plane who’d been watching Air Crash Investigation - _‘seriously, Chris, who does that on a plane, like, with other people on it. Do you think he was like, a spy?’_ \- Christen just helps her unpack the groceries, directing her through the kitchen and the cabinets Tobin is slowly learning, smiling along with Tobin’s comedic outrage and slotting the two containers of premade salad Christen can’t understand for the life of her why Tobin had bought into the fridge. 

They make dinner together, Tobin still mumbling about the audacity of plane man, questioning Christen’s legal opinion on whether or not they have grounds to sue for psychological distress. She pouts when Christen tells her that she absolutely does not, and turns back to the potatoes she’s cutting into chunks. Tobin switches the TV to a Premier League game and Christen sips at the white wine Tobin had bought but refused the offer of a glass of as she watches. Thanking architects for open plan kitchen living areas.

Christen is totally out of her depth. She thinks Tobin might be too. She switches out her wine for water and holds her plate out for Tobin to place a steak on it. 

“Do you want to sit at the table?” Tobin asks, wrapping her hair into a knot at the top of her head. Christen shrugs, collecting cutlery in one hand and balancing her plate in the other.

“Couch is good.” She says, flippantly, not paying full attention. Tobin hesitates as Christen hands her a fork, eyebrow raising. 

“Seriously?” She asks, looking at Christen as if navigating a land mine. Christen honestly has no idea what the hesitation is. It's a leather couch, it's easily cleaned, and she has TV trays. Besides all that, it's far from typical of Tobin to worry too much about spilling food on a couch. Particularly one she doesn’t own.

“Yeah. We can eat at the table if you want, though, I guess.” Christen says, frowning at Tobin confusedly, trying desperately to figure out why Tobin is cutting strange looks between her and the couch. 

“No, it's just, you know, _historically_ you’ve been-” Tobin cuts herself off. Christen has no idea what she’s talking about or why it suddenly feels like she’s been dropped into a tub of ice cold water. Tobin shakes her head with an uneasy smile before tipping her chin up. “Doesn’t matter. Lets just eat.” 

So they do. They sit on the couch Christen is now hyper aware of and eat their steak in front of a football game. Tobin swears at missed shots and Christen can’t help but cheer for an impressive goal. They discuss the semantics of incidental contact. If there was a case of cheap beer on the coffee table, it would be like they were kids again. If their plates were abandoned as they yelled at each other down hallways and across couches it would be like they were the fledgling adults they’d been trying desperately to become.

They’re not either of those people anymore. They never will be again. She doesn’t know what they are now. They feel a little like a snapshot she would have dreamed on bad nights before Tobin wandered back into the aisles of her life. Frozen in suspense, but comfortable on the tightrope. Christen had handed her the wire cutters to undo all her life, and Tobin had used them to open a packet of pasta and bring it to her five minutes before her lunch break started everyday. It has to count for something. It’s got to, because otherwise Christen is walking through the woods without an exit strategy, or any emergency contact, and she isn't prepared for that to be the case. 

A long time ago, Tobin told Christen she wasn’t worth the effort with a defeated shrug at the end of a 72 hour fight. A long time ago, Christen had ignored her for months after it, buried herself in her phone and her job and her imagination. Tried to conjure up a world where she had a loving wife and a peaceful home and a road map for her life she was confident everyone else was going to go along with. One that didn’t tunnel down to a single point. Had turned her cheek when Tobin had tried to kiss her long after they had made up and she had promised repeatedly that she was fine. 

She still remembers Tobin turning to her and saying ‘I don’t care that you’re fine, I want to know if _we’re_ fine.’ Tobin had left for an away game the next day, and Christen had packed up the apartment and carefully laid out divorce paperwork on the sparklingly bare kitchen counter that night. 

They hadn’t been fine. Christen hadn’t really been fine either, but Tobin hadn’t cared about that, so she didn’t feel a need to leave anything in the way of an explanation. Tobin had deductive reasoning. She could figure it out. 

Looking over at her now, hair slipping through her hair tie, hand resting over her full stomach, a crinkle between her eyebrows as she watches the set up of a free kick, Christen thinks that that imagined world she’d slipped into when Tobin had slipped away, the one that had been shattered by Tobin’s disregard for Christen, might have come true. It had taken five years, and yet here she was. The inevitability of it was only countered by the impossibility. 

Christen felt suspended in between the two ends. On one side drawn into the straight line she had been stuttering along alone, safe and tucked away, each footstep falling with consideration and caution. On the other, pulled back into a muttered ‘of course, of course this is where you’ve ended up, you always come home in the end.’ She feels a little like a puppet, dangling by threads controlled by herself on one end and Tobin on the other. She hates that she’s happy to lay suspended like this. 

She finishes the final bite of her meal and collects both their plates, moving back into the kitchen to load the dishwasher. Tobin groans at the referee’s call and the spell is broken. Christen goes back to not thinking about anything but the emails she needs to send.

“Hey, Kelley’s throwing a party in a few weeks.” Tobin calls over her shoulder, wide eyes watching Christen as she moves through the kitchen. Christen makes a non committal sound in the back of her throat. “You should come. See Allie, meet Bati.” 

“Yeah?” Christen asks, looking up from the dishwasher to meet Tobin’s eye. 

“Yeah. I’d like you to be there.” Tobin says, slowly, like she’s cautious in exactly how to explain herself. “If you want.”

Christen has given up on pretending like she knows how to say no to Tobin. Given up on pretending she doesn’t want to be there for Tobin. Wants to be there like she needs air to breathe and Tobin to smile. 

“I do.” Christen says, nodding. “It’ll be nice.”

Tobin grins at her, chin hooked over her arm, neck still strained to look back at her. Christen has absolutely no idea what she’s doing, but whatever it is, she’s happy to do it until she can’t anymore if it means getting to pretend Tobin will smile at her like that forever. All she really wants is the freedom to expect something from her. She’ll take any God given punishment just to see it. Hell has sufficiently frozen over.

“You’re nice.” Tobin teases, tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth for half a second. Christen laughs, shaking her head as she shuts the dishwasher with a soft click. Tobin chuckles as she turns back to the TV. 

Christen smiles the rest of the night, right until Tobin pulls her into a hug that's almost too tight, almost too heavy for not quite friends who spend all their time together, her arms as encompassing as their history. Christen pats her back awkwardly, and Tobin smiles at her, waving lightly before disappearing out the front door. Sometimes, when Tobin leaves, Christen feels like she’ll wake tomorrow morning to discover she’s been dreaming her presence all this time. Sometimes, when Tobin leaves, Christen hopes she doesn’t come back so she can go back to missing her in an uncomplicated way. 

  
  


*

Tobin invites her to go surfing with her and Kelley mid way through an unspectacular week which is largely brightened by her text messages alone. It’s a simple yes, despite the fact that Christen cannot surf and has no intention of learning. She was born in LA by the sea, not in it. She was not a water baby and she had no desire to pretend to be so. Tobin had tried to teach her when they were in college, agonised over her attempts to teach her the correct technique and get her to understand exactly how one went about balancing on a plank of styrofoam in the middle of the ocean. It had ended with Christen grazing her knee harshly on shells and Tobin buying her an icy-pole to suck on while she cleaned the wound with hastily bought betadine and too small bandages with Dora the Explorer printed on them. 

Still, Christen enjoyed the beach. Enjoyed the calm that came with sitting in the sand, running her hands through it and feeling the strands slip by. That something that seemed so expansive, that could support the weight of humans and the ebb and flow of the tide as it came in and out, could be so miniscule when isolated, so easily collapsing, never ceased to amaze her. She was happy to bury her hands in the sand and watch Tobin and Kelley attempt to outdo each other in the waves, as long as they didn’t try and drag her into it. 

It's a disruption to a years long tradition of a Sunday therapy session and meal prepping, but Christen cancels on her frankly shocked sounding therapist in a 46 second phone call and throws a few extra frozen meals into her shopping cart. There is a contingency plan for everything. Breaking routine doesn’t feel so insurmountable as it once did.

Her tendency to require a plan far outdated Tobin. It was one of the few things she had discussed in therapy that wasn’t tied back to the whole ‘I left someone in what I thought was an act of self preservation and I’ve been committing self flagellation over it ever since’ thing. They hadn’t found a solution for it yet, because the fact that she had doubled down on it after the aforementioned as a true act of self preservation, and her fear that undoing that would mean the collapse of the whole damn thing, proved to be rather a large roadblock to growth.

The notes scribbled on the exact same brand of notepad Christen prints on neatly during interviews with prospective clients which give voice to her therapists explanations of Christen’s issue aren’t present to witness her rearrange her weekend without care, though. She wonders if it still counts without testimony to affirm its truth. The lawyer forever present in the back of her mind tells her ‘no’ quite firmly, with all the smugness of someone who has just found the loose thread of the defence’s case and is eyeing down the damages she’s about to assure the plaintiff. 

The beach Tobin and Kelley decide has the best surf report for the day is only ten minutes from Christen without traffic. She packs a beach bag with a towel, sunscreen, a packet of bandages, her sunglasses, and a book about the merits of self sufficient living. It’s dutifully loaded into the passenger seat of her car, and she heads of twenty minutes before their agreed meeting time. 

It’s nearing late afternoon, both Tobin and Kelley insisting in the text chain they now had for organisational purposes, though it largely consists of Tobin chiming in to say ‘cool’ and Kelley dumping memes and screenshots of her weather app in equal measure, that it was both the best time for surf conditions and for the atmosphere. Christen would argue that the best atmospheric time would be at whatever stage you can still spot people in the water and there’s less of a chance of her being roped into dinner plans. To each their own.

She’s there before both Tobin and Kelley, five minutes ahead of their agreed meeting time, to no one's surprise at all, and so she sits in her car, parked in a space overlooking the beach in a largely empty car park, and opens her book. She folds her legs up under her, leaning her head against the window, and allows herself to become utterly engrossed in the various, and alleged, environmental and personal benefits of living a self sufficient lifestyle. 

She’s half way through a section dissecting the benefits of personal production and vegetable gardens when a hand shoots out to rap against her window, right next to where Christen’s head is leaning. She jumps in surprise, smacking her head hard enough against the window the world spins, and drops her book between her legs, cringing more at the crinkled pages then the pain in her skull. 

For a good half a second, she truly considers the possibility that she is going to be murdered in a car park overlooking a beach, completely by herself, packed with the supplies to go swimming but without a bathing suit, while waiting for her ex wife and her ex wifes friend. She imagines the editing process of the subsequent New York Times article is bound to be laden with confusion and demands to make her reasoning more succinct. She doubts they’ll be able to figure it out much better than she has been able to. 

It’s half a second of worrying about how the media will explain the events leading up to her gruesome murder in her own fourteen year old car, which will perhaps be a point of question given her occupation, another question she refuses to answer, before she hears Tobin yell and Kelley, through laughter, shake the handle of her door, demanding she unlock it. She isn’t really sure if the sight is a relief, despite having been expecting a nondescript cliche ‘bad guy’, but she unlocks the door with a press of a button and tries to ignore Kelley’s cackling as Tobin wraps a hand around her elbow and cups the back of her head in the other.

“Holy shit, Chris, I’m sorry.” Tobin’s eyes are blown wide with fear, and Christen pats the hand that's cradling her head in comfort.

“It’s fine, you just caught me off guard.” She says as reassuringly as she can. It only does so much to ease the guilt in Tobin’s eyes. Kelley is still laughing at her behind them.

Tobin manages a half nod of acceptance before Kelley is all but dragging Christen from her seat, describing in graphic detail exactly how stupid she had looked. She does an awful impression of Christen’s shock. Tobin rolls her eyes at her and hands Christen her bag, her book retrieved and placed carefully on top, having grabbed it from the passenger seat while Kelley had been busy harassing her. Christen shoots her a thankful smile, and Tobin returns it with an apologetic one. 

She blinks off the remnants of her shock and follows the two of them down the wooden stairs to the beach, dodging the tail end of their surfboards the whole way. Kelley chatters unrelentingly, down the steps, across the sand, even as she peels off her top to reveal her bikini and as she slides her wet suit up over it and as Christen zips it up for her. Tobin remains mostly silent, nodding along to whatever she’s talking about, occasionally sending Christen a smirk over something she says. Christen zips her wetsuit up for her too, after pointedly not staring at the long, tanned expanse of her back or the fact that she still, unsurprisingly, has a stomach of well defined abs. Her fingers linger just a little longer around Tobin’s neck as she does so, but that's neither here nor there. 

Tobin tries half heartedly to get her into the water, grinning at Christen broadly when she gestures at her t-shirt and shorts, making it very clear her refusal to be plied into attempting to surf. Grins even wider when Christen mentions wanting to avoid a broken knee. She shakes her head at her one last time before following Kelley into the surf, Christen settling back onto her haunches to watch them. 

Loathe as she is to admit it, and though she would never even think to say it aloud, she thinks they were onto something with the atmospheric significance of the late afternoon. The sun hasn’t set, but it’s low enough in the sky it sends a weak glow about the place, the clouds brighter as it streams through, but everything else left with a dull sheen to it. The outline of the moon is clear, though not yet glowing, and Christen watches in mild melancholy as the shops along the boardwalk bring in their signs and close up brightly coloured umbrellas. 

In the glow, Tobin, bobbing on her surfboard out among the sea, sends Christen a wave and what appears to be a bright smile. Christen has barely raised her hand to wave back before Kelley has shoved her off the board and they become entangled in a mid ocean wrestling match. Christen can hear them shrieking all the way from the shore. She laughs to herself and goes back to her book, shaking her head with a sense of fondness she’s neglected for far too long.   
  


The sun is set and Christen’s heart is strangely light by the time they come in from the water. Tobin shakes her hair out like a dog, splashing Christen. Christen squeaks indignantly, holding her book up to shield her face. It only serves to make Tobin laugh throatily, carding a hand through sea salt laden hair. 

“The ocean is a good look on you, Chris.” Tobin says, glancing down at her through heavy lids. 

Christen hums idly. “Think so?” 

“Everything is.” Tobin shrugs. 

“Back at you.” Christen says, easily. It feels like a fine line to walk, but Christen can’t find it within herself to really care in the moment. 

The waves crash against the shore, and Christen feels seven and 21 and 32 all at once. As if all the people she’s been exist in one life for the first time. Tobin grins contendly, eyes slipping closed against the sea breeze and head tipped back just enough Christen can follow the line of her jaw smoothly.

“Come on, let's get outta here.” Tobin says with a smile that loses some of its peace the longer Christen looks at it.

She holds out her hand for Christen to grab, pulling her up easily but still acting as if it's a great burden upon her so called ‘old bones.’ Christen kicks sand at her in retaliation and Kelley drapes an arm across each of their shoulders, proclaiming loudly how she is perhaps the greatest surfer that has ever stepped foot in LA. Christen feels at peace in a way she hasn’t in what feels like decades. 

  
  


*

  
  


Christen goes about life in the same way she always has. She speaks to Tobin, she does her work, she drafts a letter of resignation and backspaces the whole thing one word at a time when she realises what she’s doing. The Tobin thing is not a part of the always, but she does a good job of pretending that it is. Tobin drops lunch at her office, Jesse stops trying to get Christen to talk about it and goes back to sharing her takes on the office gossip. Christen almost calls Chloe for some stress relief during the fall out of their current case, something makes her hesitate and she shuts her phone on the idea. She’s probably busy, anyway.

Ali sends her a string of text messages with restaurant suggestions for their bi-monthly catch up. Christen is sort of dreading it. She didn’t know how to be around Ashlyn and Ali’s happiness before, she thinks she might be even more lost now. Megan is bringing her new girlfriend, some hot shot executive who is, by all reports, probably the only person in the world who can settle Megan down enough to keep her seated for an entire dinner. She had once stood so suddenly she’d sent Ali’s pasta flying at one of their dinners. Christen is hoping that Sue can help them avoid a repeat of that.

She’s happy for Megan. She really wishes she lived a different life where she had someone to sit next to at dinner tables, who would ask her what she wanted without pressure and offer to split a dessert. It takes on a new edge of pathetic to sit with two couples and discuss the shipwreck that is her life. She doesn’t even really tell them about her life anymore. Just talks about the weather like her oldest friends are strangers in a supermarket. 

Christen just texts Ali back a ‘whatever you think is best’ and continues about her life as if an exercise in despair isn’t knocking at her door and demanding she check her calendar to see the starred date, reminding her to emotionally prepare for the clusterfuck she’s bound to be walking towards. 

It takes a bottle of wine and a lot of procrastination for Christen to focus instead on what exactly one wears to your ex-wife's friend who used to be your friend's nondescript party for which you’ve been given no further information on. She tries googling it, but all she finds is a series of Cosmo articles about staying friends after a break up and advice that tells her she should limit her social interaction with Tobin to group settings. That one has already been colossally thrown out the window. She could ask Ali, but that's only inviting trouble and concerned questioning. Best case scenario was that she got wardrobe advice but had to sit through a lengthy conversation about it at dinner. Worst case was that Ali reminded her what an awful idea all this actually was. 

She ends up digging out her nicest pair of dark jeans and strappiest top. She lays them out carefully on the top of her chest of drawers, folded meticulously with her underwear and the hair product she intends to use. She goes to sleep on Friday with the piling glaring across the room at her. Demanding an explanation for the absurdity of her behaviour. Her phone is empty of messages, and she knows it's unlikely to change, so she doesn’t bother to switch it onto silent before she buries herself under the covers and counts to a hundred and back twice before finally falling asleep. 

Christen has a strange dream which involves a wedding and a lake. A tiny white picnic basket like the one she’d had as a child, resting on a scratchy blanket. There are peels of laughter and taffeta swirling around. Christen lies back against and watches stars that hang in a daylight blue sky. The lake rises steadily in front of her, creeping at the edges of the water weeds and lapping at her feet. Someone throws the bouquet straight past her as the water creeps up and over Christen’s head. She sighs into it and watches as the picnic basket floats on by, the painted miniature tea cups with the pink zig zags she knows she would find if she undid the latch, the exact ones she’d had before the world pushed her forward towards teenagehood and then adulthood and then whatever she was in now, floating off past her and into deeper water. 

She can still remember the feel of that basket under her fingers. Could reach out and brush her fingers on the dream basket and recognise it immediately. Made to look wicker but undeniably plastic. Sticky but easily wiped of spilt red cortical and dirt. In Christen’s childhood every crevice of it had had sand from the beach stuffed into it. She had taken great care to ensure the pristine whiteness of the basket remained. The latch had broken when Tyler had tripped over it and Christen had cried while her Dad smoothed a hand over her head. Even then she had been unrelentingly determined to keep things impermanent and cheap safe and immortalised in a museum of her own design.

She’d used that basket to create tea parties and careful evenings with her friends. As she’d gotten a little older she’d imagined playing house with it. First pretending to imagine a husband, and then conceding the more truthful want for one of her friends to sit across from her with their braids and compliment her special tea, which was really just cordial she’d taken from the kitchen without asking. They’d outgrown it too quickly, the little girls across from her becoming scornful of the babyish behaviour and Christen agreeing without hesitation as soon as she felt she had no choice but to do so. Her mother had packed it up into the attic for safe keeping.

Some days Christen really can’t believe that she’ll never get to be that little girl again. Never get the pure joy of reaching for something and finding it there. Of being yelled at when she’d run off and scared her parents senseless, of being young enough to not understand it, but be comforted by the hug that followed. She understands too much now, and yet she feels she knows less than she did. 

Dream Christen reaches through the water lilies and weeds for the basket. The water floods her nose and she wakes with a gasp. The taste of freshwater and longing fills her mouth her whole Saturday, even once the dream begins to fade into one long blur and she goes about pouring herself coffee and finishing up what little work she needs to get done.

Tobin had offered to give her a lift to the party, but Christen had politely declined, not wanting to be confined to a car with Tobin. Her kitchen was different. There were counters to hide behind and it was hers. Entirely hers. She had always been the kid that tried to divert every sleepover into her house. Was still the adult that preferred people coming into her space than being thrust into theirs. She wouldn’t change that for Tobin.

She dresses hastily, spends too much time on her makeup, and orders an Uber. She leaves her hair in curls, carefully arranged over her shoulders. She spends the whole drive to address Tobin had text her staring out the window and tapping a pattern against the back of her phone. The driver leaves her in silence after a murmured greeting, and Christen is incredibly grateful. She plans on leaving him a hefty tip for both not forcing her into conversation and not telling her to stop tapping for the love of god. 

The address they arrive at is a house that practically opens onto the beach. There's railing that surrounds it and a basketball hoop in the driveway. It looks like an LA dream house. One that Christen would’ve bought in a different life. A life that involved family dinners instead of dodged calls and modernist interior design. She practically skips up the front steps and raps on the door. She doesn’t let herself feel uncomfortable with any of it. Just thinks about the fact she gets to see her friends again, a term that is slowly beginning to include Tobin as well. 

Kelley is the one to swing open the door, wearing a half open Hawaiian shirt and baggy jeans. She’s wearing the same impish grin she’s always had, and Christen feels the tension ease from her shoulders as she drags her into a sweaty hug, yelling in her ear how good it is to see her, and how hot she looks. Christen laughs, patting at Kelley’s back and allowing herself to be dragged into the house.

It’s a nice place, with smooth floorboards and an air of calm to it. There's a row of pot plants along the large windows and Christen thinks she can smell incense. It’s overshadowed by the mass of alcohol lining the kitchen tables, everything from slabs of beer to reasonable quality rum There are red cups stacked along every surface and Christen is 32, if she sees a single keg, or anyone looking like they’re even considering doing a kegstand, she will be out of the building before anyone has the chance to even realise she’s there. The crowd is varied in age, but she doesn’t see anyone looking too egregiously like a frat boy, so Christen warily agrees to follow Kelley deeper into the house.

There's a few faces she recognises. Including a couple of Tobin’s national and Portland teammates. A bouncing brunette named Rose who is in the middle of egging on a small blonde named Emily - _‘call me Sonnett’_ \- who’s skulling a beer, introduces herself as Tobin’s teammate and looks at her with eyes that are far too wondrous for Christen’s comfort. Allie shoulders her into a tight hug, mumbling about how Tobin’s being keeping Christen all too herself, a comment Christen ignores with all her might. She introduces her to the husband she’s never met and the slice of her life Christen doesn’t have access to anymore. He’s nice, calmer than she expected, but playful in a way that fits. 

Christen makes conversation with people she hardly knows, keeping half an eye out for Tobin, who has yet to make her appearance. She haltingly discusses what being a lawyer entails to a group of Tobin’s teammates, having to pause every few moments to explain whatever legalese term has slipped into a sentence by habit. She doesn’t know why they care, half suspects she’s being mocked, but they’re wide eyed and giddy, and Christen knows how to talk about the law, even if she doesn’t know much else these days, so she spends forty-five minutes with her back against a wall explaining what a plaintiff is. It’s not a hard concept. The girls struggle with it anyway, dissolving into fits of giggles every time one of them tries to articulate it. 

She still can’t find Tobin amongst the crowd. Even as she spies the banner which reads ‘congrats Tobito’ across the back patio. There's a bonfire outside, a few people toasting marshmallows while another group play beer pong irresponsibly close by. It takes her an hour to realise this is almost certainly a party celebrating Tobin’s retirement. She feels itchy all over, too hot amongst the crowd and in desperate need of another drink. 

She cuts herself off halfway through a sentence to wander back to the kitchen and pour herself a drink that is about 70/30 vodka and cranberry juice. She downs it in one go before polishing off a shot and grabbing herself a beer. Christen doesn’t really like beer all that much, but she sips at it as she heads outside without cringing too much.

The fire is in a carefully contained pit, surrounded by furniture that's far too nice for how it's being treated by a crowd of smokers Christen doesn’t recognise. She supposes they’re friends of Kelley’s. Or Tobin’s. She doesn’t know Tobin, they could be her friends. She has to keep reminding herself of the gap that exists between them now, otherwise it's far too easy to imagine that they’ve been together this whole time. Not that they’re together _now_. Christen’s alcohol riddled brain just sends her careening into that thought in a similar way to how it sends her swaying as she tries to make it safely to one of the outdoor couches situated in front of the fire pit that isn’t covered in ash trays. 

She watches the flames dance around, licking up the edges of the silver dish that is their home. It’s honestly a little strange. The idea that you can contain fire, so destructive and uncontrollable by nature, with such relative ease. As long as you’re the one to strike the match, it can’t hurt you. Not unless you shove your hand into it, by choice or by force. 

“Hey” Tobin plops down by her side without Christen having even realised she was approaching, breaking her train of thought, sitting close enough that their knees touch. She’s got a dopey grin on her face and hazed over eyes. 

“Hey, stranger.” She mumbles, bumping their shoulders lightly in greeting. Tobin’s wearing a leather jacket and torn apart jeans. She looks good, really good. No snapback disrupting the soft brown of her hair as it spills over her shoulders. She’d probably look good even if there was one. “Nice place.”

Tobin looks at her with a raised eyebrow. “How’d you know it's mine?”

“I didn’t, but you just confirmed it.” Christen says, smiling at her cheekily. Tobin sighs a laugh, angling her body a little to face Christen properly, head lent in her palm, her arm braced against the back of the couch. 

“Lawyer.” Tobin smirks, eyes twinkling with dancing flames and amusement. 

Christen hums in agreement. “That and Kelley doesn’t have good enough taste for it to be hers.” 

It looks like a home they’d have together in the best version of their lives. She sighs. 

Tobin laughs, low and throaty, running a hand along the underside of her jaw. Behind them, someone lands a ping pong ball in someone else's plastic solo cup. The crowd cheers as a poor soul is forced to down cheap beer, everybody around them egging them on. Christen thinks Kelley and her girlfriend might be among them. She’s almost certain that Allie is participating, and that Bati is cheering for her. 

“You look happy, Chris.” Tobin smiles, a little rueful but honest, fiddling with the zipper on her jacket, drawing Christen’s attention away from the commotion behind them. Her hair glows golden in the firelight, a few strands curled and knotted among the rest. Her calves practically bulge out of her jeans. Christen feels a little like a teenager, but she can’t help the way her eyes rake over her. 

Christen thinks about that statement, as much as the fuzzy edges of her brain will allow her to. She thinks she must have done a particularly good job with her lipstick, because she doesn’t know what else could make her look like that. Christen’s not unhappy, exactly. She’s just not quite anything. Not when she isn’t wrapped up in something or someone. Not when she’s not thoroughly distracted.

She’s not really sure what constitutes happiness anymore. It used to live and die with Tobin’s mood. If she lived by that now she’d surely die. She doesn’t have much access to her emotional state, or any of the thoughts that cross her head, so it would probably be a largely stunted exercise. Christen lives in a perpetual state of alright. She isn’t particularly happy, she’s isn’t in need of an emergency intervention. She does alright. She goes to the supermarket after work and allows herself to stock her fridge with ice cream. She does her work, sleeps with people looking for nothing further. She laughs when Tobin’s around, tries not to wait for her to show up with lunch, but lives for the moments when she does. Christen is fine. She’s ok. She’s just not sure where Tobin got the other adjective from.

“Oh.” She says, blinking at Tobin. Her filter has been worn down by the alcohol, so she shrugs and says quite confidently, “I am not.” 

“No?” Tobin breathes. The weight of her knee feels heavier against Christen’s somehow, even through the numbness of the alcohol. 

“No. I don’t think so. Maybe I was, but… I am not.” Christen sighs. It feels like the world has shrunk a little bit. Tobin looks at her, and Christen thinks she can see everything. Every word unspoken, every pressure point beneath her skin, every open and bleeding wound. Every night spent fitfully awake. She feels like a well read book Tobin is deliberating on the merits of keeping. She wants her to keep her. She wants to be nestled back onto Tobin’s bookshelf. Even if she’s never picked back up again, she wants to be kept, just this once. 

“I want you to be happy.” It's said so quietly Christen thinks she might have missed it if it wasn’t for how close they are. Christen can’t help the way her head dips forward a little, her nose almost close enough to brush Tobin’s, her breath fanning against her cheek. Tobin shifts her head against her palm so it's leaning forward.

“Yeah?” Christen whispers. Tobin wets her lips.

“Yeah.” she says, and almost as suddenly as Tobin had appeared next to her, they’re kissing.

The angle is a little strange, Tobin sliding her hand awkwardly out from under her head to grab at Christen’s cheek, surely leaving herself with a crick in her neck. Christen’s face is too low, and Tobin’s too high. They both taste like alcohol and Christen’s lipstick is certainly rubbing over Tobin’s mouth. She doesn’t mind, though. Doesn’t mind at all. Because Tobin is kissing her like she can’t go another second without doing so. Kissing her like it's all she’s wanted to do, and Christen is meeting her in every step.

The fire cracks, and Christen pays no attention, simply shifting up the couch to meet Tobin where she is. She wants to be closer, forever closer. Her lungs scream at her for oxygen but she pays them no mind. She just wants to live in the broken suspense, in the taste of Tobin’s chapstick and the warmth of her fingers on Christen’s cheek, the silkiness of her hair between Christen’s fingers, until she knows nothing else. She wants, she wants, she wants. 

And then the beer pong table breaks out in cheers and groans, someone throwing a can against the back of the couch they’re on, and Christen realises what the hell she’s doing, and for as much as there wasn’t air before, now, _she can’t fucking breathe_. She tears herself out of Tobin’s hold too fast for her drunk mind to catch up with, sending her stumbling as she jumps to her feet to escape the impossible, tortuous, agonising closeness. 

Tobin looks up at her with wide eyes, and Christen sees the words ‘I hate you’ and the plates she’d carefully picked out while Tobin rode the trolley smashed on the floor and the ruins of her life reflected back in them. Sees the destruction that they are, the idiot that Christen is, and curses herself for ever thinking she knew better then every lesson Tobin had ever studiously taught her. They had perfected the art of hurting each other. This was just another exercise in it, and Christen wants to crawl out of her own skin.

“Chris-” Tobin starts, voice hoarse, and Christen shakes her head in disgust, ignoring the stumble in her step as she backs away.

“ _No_ ” she says, loudly. She doesn’t catch the people turning to shoot them uneasy looks, but she does see the way Tobin’s mouth gapes open and shut, the way Christen’s lipstick is smudged around it. The way everything has led back to this point and this point had turned out to be the final cut in a litany of thousands. 

Christen can’t do this. She practically runs back through the house and out onto the nature strip, ordering her Uber with shaking hands while heading off at as brisk a pace as she can manage down the street, and all the while the only thought that fills her head is simple. She can’t do this again.

She has nothing left to give. She _can’t_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come chat at softnoirr on tumblr (responses are faster and more likely there then here, I am afraid)


	7. My Atlantis, we fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's in my heart, it's in my head  
> You can't take back the things you said"  
> \- Atlantis, Seafret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter exists in two versions on my computer because it's original version had to essentially be gutted and totally rewritten. However, I did promise someone an update by midweek at the latest, and I hope whoever they are takes as much satisfaction in how much earlier than expected this is as I do. 
> 
> Ben and Jerry's does not make an appearance in this chapter and thus I do not any fun google searches to share. The best I have is the search results for 'LA streetlights' which came up with the LA Bureau of Street Lighting which seems like a fine (if vaguely absurd) establishment. 
> 
> Enjoy x.

  
The streets of LA blur into one long line of colour, mollified together by the tears that blur her eyes and the darkness of the streets cut by the electric starkness. Neon ‘open’ signs flash and street lights hum their guidance, traffic lights commanding the streets, all of it bouncing off the edges of the glass windows of her Uber. Christen feels as though she may as well be a light on the side of the road. Unreachable, sliding across everyone and yet remaining unfounded, untether. You could push your hand into the glow and see it reflected, but only in the spot it stood. Only until the electricity was cut or the sun rose. The only thing she’s shining light on is the road to her own destruction, but there has to be at least someone willing to follow along for the sake of the show, so perhaps she has a purpose after all. 

No one had followed her, though. So maybe she didn’t.

She’d told the driver Jesse’s address, unwilling to go home to the sparseness of her own living room, or the wilting flowers on her countertop. To the grey walls and grey floors and grey mood. The couch Tobin had inhabited and the TV she’d set her eyes on. Christen wants to burn it with enough heat to mummify it. Wants to create her own little Pompeii. Wants to wipe the makeup and the phantom touch off with as much ferocity as she can muster. Wants with the fury of a sun. She feels burnt out like one, too. 

The driver had tried to make conversation, but had slipped into halted silence when Christen began to sob, unrelenting in her tears like she hasn’t been since she was a child. 

Now, through it, in spite of or perhaps because of the tears that cloud her eyes, she can see the world as an adult. Blurred lines and fleeting light. Jesse’s front door and the ridicule of her expression as she takes in Christen’s tear streaked cheeks but still lets her in. Christen resolves to tip her driver generously in exchange for him not rerouting to a mental hospital, and collapses into her work colleagues arms as if they are the oldest of friends reuniting at the end of a long separation, amazed by their own survival. 

Christen remembers a scene in Alice and Wonderland her parents had let her watch because, horror movie that it was, it masqueraded itself as a children's film. Alice had been falling, tricked into metamorphosis and discomfort and tears to wash herself away with through her own inability to keep her mind out of daydreams and her hand out of the cookie jar. Christen supposes the horrible swirling colours and crisis of it was supposed to teach children an important lesson about not knowingly making terrible decisions despite every warning you’ve ever had. She wonders if they knew it would only serve to function as a lens through which to examine your adult self.

It's not impossible to think of Tobin as a little like Wonderland. Perfect and terrifying and utterly unrealistic. Ultimately only a dream that toes the edge of a nightmare, one she will return to time and time again, hoping that maybe this time she won’t wake up. Christen feels wide awake now, even as she sobs herself to sleep on Jesse’s too small couch, breathing so heavily her body has no choice but to let sleep overcome her. She’s never been more aware of how mad Alice must have been to seek the place out so insistently. Christen had no white rabbit but herself, and she’d done enough harm all on her own. 

She had thought they were getting close to friendship. Apparently, they had been hurtling towards the same disaster over and over, some sick groundhog day that reimagined it all just enough to keep her guessing whether Tobin would really want her this time. Christen doesn’t have a strong enough heart to keep it beating through that again. She feels close to collapsing and never moving again as it is. 

Jesse’s couch is stiff leather, cold to the touch when Christen collapses onto it but burning hot when she wakes up 12 hours later. Laying on the coolness is as close as she can get to relief. The burn is just a continuation of a maddening theme. She’d shut her phone off the second she’d payed for and tipped her Uber, already filled with miss calls from Kelley, Alex, Allie, even an unknown number she suspects is Lindsey calling to yell at her. There were none from Tobin. The phone still manages to burn a hole in her pocket. 

There was a very tight string she had been walking for far too long. It necessitated continuation. No earth reckoning moments. Changes, maybe, but only incorporations into a routine she had pre-established. No loving Tobin in anything but the far recesses of her mind that even she didn’t have access to. No letting herself want for anything beyond the bare essentials and functionality. 

Christen had let herself love Tobin. The string had broken out from under her feet. She’d left before she had to hit the cement, nobody there to catch her in the freefall. It was the path more travelled in her life. She was still largely lost among it.

Christen left. Tobin didn’t call. They’d been here two too many times before. 

Jesse lets her wallow on her couch nearly all day, cutting her hesitant glances like she isn’t really sure how to go about any of this. Christen doesn’t blame her. They aren’t nearly close enough to witness full scale emotional breakdowns. If the situation were reversed Christen would’ve been searching Jesse’s contacts for literally anyone else to try and handle it, because she was not any degree of qualified enough for this sort of thing. If she were, she wouldn’t be having a breakdown on her work friends couch because the ex wife she’d so self sabotaging invited back into her life had kissed her and Christen had realised how colossally stupid she was for her. 

She would be embarrassed over the display she’s putting on, but, in all honesty, Christen suspects that she won’t be in LA much longer after this. She runs when it gets tough. That's her hamartia, and her saving grace. As long as her boss doesn’t witness the collapse of what remains of her dignity, and thus her letter of recommendation remains intact, she doesn’t need to worry too much. Christen will prosecute anyone who uses this against her. She’s not sure how, but she’s certain she’ll make it work. 

Jesse makes a blithe attempt at checking in on her, presumably to validate that Christen isn’t planning on throwing herself from her rooftop. 

“Just tell me you’re okay, Chris.” she says, resting on the couch across her after placing a glass of water in front of her on the coffee table. She’s had far more grace than Christen would have, all things considered.

She smiles as best she can, it doesn’t even touch the ache in her cheeks she’d gotten used to after months around Tobin. “Yeah. Always.” 

“Is it… is it that Tobin chick?” Jesse asks, and Christen can tell immediately that her vapid curiosity is warring with the educated part of her that truly doesn’t want to know. Christen wishes she would’ve listened to that side a little better. 

In a strange way, Christen wants to explain all of it to Jesse. Not to get it off her own chest, but to rewrite and defend Tobin in her head. Wants it utterly clear that the Tobin Jesse has in her mind off the pieces she’s scraped together and the look on Christen’s face when she’d shown up here - and they aren’t that close, but Jesse is a lawyer too, she’s sure she’s got at least an opening statement on the status of their relationship ready to go - is not the Tobin that Christen knows. Her spirit is the same, her danger, but she’d been so good this time. 

They’d been so close. 

The current had dragged them out and away before Christen had even realised it was a riptide, too caught up in the summer sky and the sound of Tobin’s laughter as it was swept away by the breeze, right before she’d kissed Tobin and the sea salt had poisoned them both. She wants it clear, like nothing ever has been, that Tobin is not the Tobin of her weakest moments. Christen is the Christen of her worst decisions. She still can’t stand to think about her right now, though. 

Tobin isn’t really hers to defend, not anymore. Would probably be horrified by the thought of it. So Christen feels fine when she looks at Jesse and says firmly, “No.” 

It would never fly in front of Ali, who has known her highs and lows, or Megan, who’s willing to call her out on a lie without so much as flinching. Jesse isn’t really asking about Christen, though. Or Tobin. She’s asking about them, their professional relationship, the status they exist in now. The breath of expectation across the room whether they’re going to take a hard right, or if they’ll be allowed to continue. Jesse doesn’t care if Christen is okay. Jesse wants to know if Jesse’s going to be okay. Questions like that seldom require honesty.

She’s not even lying about her own emotional state, really. She’s lying about the Tobin thing, but that's an omission of detail. If they argued it in court Christen would scrape together a genius argument of facts which essentially amounted to the idea that Christen was upset over her difficulties with parasocial relationships and her responses to them, rather than any one individual. She’d win the case. That doesn’t make it totally true. 

She is okay, though. She’s okay in the same way she was when Ali asked her that question five years ago, all her worldly possessions in boxes on the floor of her and Ashlyn’s home. She’s okay in the way she is when she wakes up and realises that it is yet another day spent without the love of her life by her side. She can function. She can go along with it. Just, sometimes, some days, she’d like it if the world didn’t feel like it only existed in another city or a fifteen minute drive or a week away. If the world could expand its horizons. If she could have stayed in its rotation. If she could stand still as it spun, instead of being thrown to the ground with every move.

The world is tearing at the seams, and she is too, but she can’t remember for the life of her how to stitch. She falls back down the rabbit hole and spins her way down. 

Her phone rests on the coffee table next to the glass of water Jesse had gotten for her. She still hasn’t switched it on. She knows if she does the tidal wave will come up over her head. The water will flood her lungs, burn her throat and nose and eyes, shove and pull at her, grazing her knees on the shells at the bottom without anyone to clean her wounds with loving hands. It seems to burn a hole in the table the same way it does in her amygdala. 

She’d taken undergrad psychology classes when the world still seemed infinite and interests allowed. They’d spent months discussing the exact purpose and function of each area of the brain. The one that had stuck with Christen was the amygdala, the epicentre of emotions, in a basic understanding. Emotionally significant memory, in particular. Any experience that triggered adrenaline tended to be stored in more detail due to its supposed significance. An evolutionary instinct. Perfect for ensuring that the break down of your marriage or the would-be-reconciliation of it five years too little too late remains seared in your cerebellum. They had found, through research of terribly unfortunate people who were luckier than Christen, that damage to the amygdala prevented the creation of a conditioned fear response. That was, an emotional reaction of fear and aversion that had been conditioned through the repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus and one that elicited fear. Christen often wondered if hitting herself in the head in roughly the area she remembered them pointing to as the site of the amygdala would save her a lot of trouble. 

If maybe she could shake this voice in the back of her head forever insisting she had to run, had to get up and get away before she couldn’t, she’d be a little happier. Not a lot. But maybe a little. A little could be enough. A little piece of Tobin had been enough to keep her smiling for months on end. A lot would burn her out, and had, but a piece, that she could do. 

She could slam her head against the edge of the coffee table now, to rid herself of this self sabotaging conditioning. All that would do was freak out Jesse, though, so she keeps her head on her palm and nods along with the change of topic she thinks has to do with the guy Jesse has been tentatively seeing and how she isn’t sure if 5’11 really cuts it. Christen doesn’t think it should matter. She also doesn’t really hear any of it over the thunder in her ears. 

It's Friday, and the world is very loud. She’d just like a moment of peace. True peace requires Tobin, as she’s learnt, and she only brings turmoil. She resigns herself to the noise. 

On the Monday after she arrives at Jesse’s house as an outright wreck covered in alcohol and ill timed love, Jesse lends her clothes, a shower, and gives her a lift to work. Neither of them talk about it. Neither of them really talk about all that much at all. Christen’s okay with it, happy to sit behind her desk and peruse through her emails and the first draft of an opening statement. She types almost on instinct, legalese pouring from her fingertips even as her eyes go glassy on their view of her screen. Jesse brings her a sandwich at lunch. Christen squeezes her hand in thanks and doesn’t know whether to cry or breathe a sigh of relief at the lack of Tobin. She feels itchy all over. 

Christen is very effective at time management. Her week goes like this: 

She kisses Tobin and pulls the rug out from herself on Saturday. She goes to Jesse’s. She forever alters a key element of their friendship, that was, the absolute lack of knowledge they had about the deeper layers of each other's lives. 

She mopes about and worries at her lip and tries to figure out how to make the jittery, burning sensation under her chest on Sunday.

She goes to work on Monday, and she tries not to cry in the breakroom when she realises she’s still half waiting for Tobin to bring her lunch. Still half waiting for her to show up in spite of every single signal Christen has given her to stay away. Jesse drops her at her house. Christen sleeps.

She smashes a glass and breaks a pot plant upon realising that she’s been here so many times before, attempting over and over to get the painting right without any skill with a brush on Tuesday. She finishes her opening statement that night. 

On Wednesday she tries to watch something on Netflix after work and shuts her laptop on the title card for ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ before going back to work documents. 

Ali harasses her over email, a complaint about her not answering her still switched off phone, on Thursday. A reminder of the dinner with her and Ashlyn along with Pinoe and Sue. She cries, she buys candles she doesn’t light, she steels herself for what is bound to be a hellish dinner with her best, and only, friends on Friday.

No one asks if anything is wrong all week. Say what you like about Christen and her coping mechanisms, she knows how to compartmentalise and carry on. She still feels pressure building in her head every time she lets herself even think about Tobin. That’s an aside.

Christen has been having dinner with Ashlyn, Ali, and Megan at least once a month since she was twenty-five and they all decided it was time to start acting like mature adults, going out to a restaurant instead of doing body shots. As it turned out, Ashlyn and Megan had still figured a way to do body shots at their first attempt at a mature evening out, and both Ali and Christen had been more than happy to follow them to a club halfway through their meal. It was only in recent years, with marriages and jobs and the phrase ‘Christen, are you sure you’re ok?’ that they’d finally managed to get together for a genuinely adult tinged evening. It was almost as bittersweet as the red wine they all drank instead of tequila shots nowadays. 

Tobin used to come on occasion, when she was around and Christen wanted to be around her. When it didn’t just dissolve into wounded looks when she wanted her own dessert. It burns in her like Icarus, but she’d let herself be utterly consumed just to split a dessert with her now.

It was a thought that had hit her somewhere between the desperate need to get closer to Tobin, to crawl up under her skin and stay there forever, to never have to be parted from her again, to follow and follow and follow as if direction lived in her step. Then hit the violent understanding that she was being led astray, that there was no path that led home from this. She loved her, but they couldn’t, she couldn’t, she can’t. 

Home lived in Tobin, but Tobin would never be home again. 

For the first time, Christen doesn’t know. Doesn’t know what she feels, what she wants, who she is, where Tobin is or what she’d done once Christen had gotten into her Uber and Allie’s voice yelling ‘Chris!’ had disappeared into the distance. She knows she didn’t call. She knows she can’t handle any of this. Knows that it had dug itself up when she attempted to bury it alive. That’s about the extent of her knowledge. It’s not quite enough.

She puts on her nicest non work dress, which still screams ‘lawyer’ with all its might., straightens her hair with careful precision, applies her makeup, is mature and careful. She looks like a woman who does her taxes properly. Who has plans and direction. She can do her taxes. She has many directions. Most of her plans are null and void. She smiles at herself in the mirror until it slips of its own accord, and she heads to the restaurant she’d agreed to meet her friends in. 

Christen feels a little like a child playing dress up in her Mother's heels and lipstick. Her Mum would know what to do, if she was here. She’d always loved Tobin, and she’d always seen straight to the heart of the matter. Christen thinks that if she was here, she wouldn’t feel flayed open and put on display for a restaurant that smells like dimming ambition and good money. Would know how to go about this life that she never quite meant to have. 

She thinks if Tobin was here and the world was different, the problem wasn’t her, she’d know what to do, her spirit calming and sure. 

Ali and Ashlyn both give her lipstick laden kisses on her cheek as she takes her place at the table. She tries not to think about the taste of Tobin’s chapstick, how she’d wanted to only taste that for the rest of her life. She sips at the wine Ash pours for her and laughs along with Ashlyn and Ali’s stories about work and their two enormous dogs, watching each other as they talk with love that settles like sand. 

When Megan arrives, smiling wider than Christen knew she could, Sue on her arm, Christen can’t help but smile along, shaking Sue’s hands even as everyone else hugs her. She doesn’t need to think about Tobin in anyone else's arms. They talk about work and Megan places kisses against Sue’s cheekbone that she pretends to only tolerate but seems to enjoy a little more than she lets on, leaning into Megan’s hold. Christen looks away from the display, feeling both like she’s intruding on their moment and someone is intruding on hers.   
  
Sue’s nice, and Christen likes her a little more than she expected to. Even manages to laugh at a few of her jokes, despite the knot in her bones the shape of Tobin. She’s a pretty high flying executive, by account of Megan's bragging, and Christen gets along with her well on account of their mutual interest and understanding in company culture and commercial law. Along with their penchant for making fun of Megan. Christen manages a laugh at one of her anecdotes about the human resources department. She likes Sue, she likes all her friends, but she doesn’t know how her life got here. Doesn’t know how she arrived at this point without Tobin. 

It’s too much to be alone. It’s too much to be together. It’s a litany of stop, stop, stop, go, go, go.

I love you, please leave. I love you, please follow where I go. I love you, please don’t let me ruin this. I love you, don’t let there be a this. I love you, why wasn’t I worth the effort?

Why? Why did you say it? Why did you do this to us? Why did I do this to you?

Christen feels itchy all over, her hair brushing at her neck uncomfortably, her dress too tight, the seat next to her, filled by Ali, far too empty. 

The restaurant is on the verge of fancy. The sort of place upper middle class families dress their children up to take them to, and old couples ate lunch at before attending the opera. Where young professionals could flaunt a disposable income on expensive wine and entrees for the table. It's far from the calmness of the vegan restaurant she’d shown Tobin. It’s the sort of room she supposes she’s meant to fit into. The one she maybe would if her plans had been better suited for her soul.

She’s beginning to realise, in the glorious devastation, the streets of Pompeii a moment prior to destruction that is now her life, that her plans were never for them. They were for ideas of them. She’s beginning to realise her roots were so tied to Tobin’s she never even looked around to notice if they had flowered or not, caught in the dirt riddled untangling, snipping and shearing at things content to stay where they were. 

She’s beginning to realise she never asked exactly why she wasn’t worth the effort. Not when Tobin said it. Not after. Not in the hospital when Tobin had said ‘it was complicated’ like that explained anything. 

She doesn’t even realise she’s speaking, or that anyone else was when she announces to a table who have long since moved past the ‘how are you' questions, “I kissed Tobin.”

Ashlyn chokes on her bite of pasta, Pinoe slapping at her back while staring at Christen increndously. Ali freezes, mouth open, lips still half forming the words she was midway through saying. Sue looks completely nonplussed, still spooning soup into her mouth. A weight feels shifted off her chest and into her stomach.

“Christen, what the fuck?” Ashlyn exclaims. A woman two tables away shoots her a dirty look. An elderly couple mumble disapprovingly from across the room. Ashlyn ignores them, continuing to look at Christen like she’s grown two heads. 

“Tobin? As in…” Megan prompts, eyebrows raised.

“Heath. Tobin Heath.” She confirms, taking a large pull from her wine and ignoring the bitterness, dropping it back to the table with a thud, using enough force to spill the dark red all over the white table cloth if she hadn’t just downed half of it. 

“Who?” Sue asks, looking between the group of them with piqued interest, a half amused glint in her eyes even as she takes in the weight of the conversation. Christen really likes Sue. She thinks Tobin would get a kick out of her. 

Tobin probably wouldn’t think getting to know her was worth the effort, though. Or maybe she would. Maybe her apathy to trying was directly related to Christen. She swears to God for a moment it had felt like she was trying, but she can’t have been, she had said it herself, Christen wasn’t worth that sort of effort. Christen’s face feels like it's burning, she blames it on the wine. 

Ali makes a sound in the back of her throat Christen can’t quite place. Something between annoyance and expectancy as she explains, “Her ex-wife.”

Sue whistles. Megan grins at Christen. Ali watches her sadly. Ashlyn is still choking. Christen thinks that if Tobin were here, she’d have laughed and tossed a balled up napkin across the table, head tipped to the side as she eased herself into the atmosphere. She can almost feel the phantom gaze on the side of her head. She loves her. It's too much, far too much, but she wants it anyway. 

It's a long list of

Why?

Why?

Why? 

Why?

All the way down to her toes. 

“Wait. Sorry. Catch me up here, babe. Tobin, who’s apartment I once broke into - which is a felony, by the way - to get your favorite pot plant after you divorced her, kissed you? I mean, we all knew you weren’t over her, you never let me pawn that ring, but-” Ashlyn is looking at Christen like she’s lost her mind. 

It’s not a wild leap to make. Especially since she had, in fact, once requested that Ashlyn commit the aforementioned breaking and entering, along with the burglary in the wake of their break up. Christen feels a little untethered. She knows how to fix it. She just isn’t sure how welcome the solution is. 

The thing is, Christen feels a little like she’s losing her mind, like she can’t do any of this, doesn’t have the answer to any of her questions. The two things she knows are in constant conflict with one another. Fighting for dominance. Each edging out over the other at any given moment to try and direct her one way or another. Loving Tobin is ingrained in who she is. Failure isn’t. They’re far too close together for comfort. But, despite it all, the solution is plain. 

Her Dad had once told her that fear was never a reason not to do something. She doesn’t know how to apply parental advice to this spectacular mess they’ve made. Parents could never imagine the degree to which their children could stray from the careful curations of themselves. 

“I don’t know if she kissed me. I think we kissed each other.” Christen says, mainly to divert the conversation for another half a second. It doesn’t work, if the set of Ashlyn’s jaw is anything to go by.

“Shut up.” Ashlyn says. Christen blinks in surprise but closes her mouth. “Is this real? You and her. It’s not some weird convenience thing?”

“Trust me, there's nothing convenient about this” she shakes her head viciously, laughing without humour. “It’s the only real thing there is.” 

“Rude.” Pinoe mutters, smirking at her teasingly. Sue slaps her shoulder without malice. Christen smiles, a muted little thing, eyes set on her wine glass. 

“It doesn’t matter, though, right? Because she said I wasn’t worth the effort. And it's inconvenient, so there's no way this is anything, right?” Christen says, dragging the edge of her finger nail along the table cloth. Back and forth, back and forth, for better and worse. Why hasn't she stuck around for worse? Why hadn’t she been worth it?

Christen cannot breathe. She needs Ali to tell her, right here in this stupid restaurant, that she’s right. Of course she’s right. Christen has deluded herself and this will go down as a vicious knife of a year. Tobin said she wasn’t worth the effort, let it be done and let dead things die. Just so long as Ali tells her she’s right. 

“Hey, Chris?” Ali says, voice calm and smooth, the way it had been on Christen’s wedding day as she’d whispered ‘you’ve got this’ before sending Christen on her merry way down the aisle. Christen hadn’t really needed it then. She’d been sure about Tobin. Felt that they were unbreakable. That time would prove them the fortress she felt that they were. Come what may, for better or worse, Tobin was everything, she knew she could handle it. As it turned out, what she couldn’t handle, what had shattered that youthful veneer, was her loss.

Loss was a strange word. How she felt for Tobin wasn’t the same as grief for those that could never come home. Couldn’t. Not wouldn’t. How did you grieve for people still alive? Still moving forward far from you. She remembers leaving like it was yesterday. Back then, she’d been sure she was only formalising a step Tobin had already taken when she’d said she wasn’t worth it, when she’d said she didn't care if Christen was okay, when she tossed ‘maybe I should go find her, then’ across the room like it was a real possibility. Like she’d really go out and fuck someone else and by God, how had they gotten to that point? How had Christen been so petty and deliberately devastating and Tobin so unforgiving as she matched her cruelty. Christen can’t breathe until she has an answer. 

“Yes, Al?” she asks, sighing heavily, her reply nothing like the excited ‘obviously’ she’d trilled back at Ali on her wedding day. Christen is scared for that girl, for what's to come. She’s lacking air to keep the woman she is now going. 

“I think you should go talk to Tobin.” Ali says it soothingly, pressing a hand onto her arm. Christen thinks she might be right.

When she leaves the restaurant, it's the final act. The sacrificial lamb to the altar. She wants to know what the fuck happened. She wants Tobin to tell her. And then she wants to give it up. The pretence, either of their relationship or her life following it. She wants to not be scared for the storm incoming. She can’t help but cower, though.

She nods at Ali, apologises to Sue, who shrugs with an amused smirk, kisses both Pinoe and Ashlyn on the tops of their heads and leaves, the click of her heels buried against the carpet of the fine dining area. She gets her phone out as she walks to the car. Opens it on the messages she’s left ignored for long enough, scrolls through what feels like hundreds, only taking note of a few and types out a response. Braced for impact. 

Christen:  
9:09pm. We need to talk. I am coming over. 

She backspaces the whole thing right before she presses send. This is her effort. Tobin doesn’t get a chance to pretend. They’re going to talk without veneer. If a restaurant in Southern California has seen her guts splayed out and the ruins beneath her feet, then she at least deserves to see Tobin surprise when she opens the door. 

Christen has one question to be settled once and for all: Why had she never been worth the effort? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my responses are more rapid and likely on tumblr at softnoirr


	8. It was a flood that wrecked this home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Well I've lost it all, I'm just a silhouette  
> A lifeless face that you'll soon forget  
> My eyes are damp from the words you left  
> Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The catharsis you've all been seeking (pt 1.) 
> 
> Neither you nor I believe I managed to keep half made promises and get this out so quickly, but I felt like being kind.
> 
> Please enjoy, if you do, please tell me about it xx

The strange thing about direction, is that, for the most part, it isn’t particularly fixed on any one path, not when it really comes down to it. There are always road maps telling you to stay straight, just as surely as there is signage directing you to take the next left, no matter how hard the turn is. Often, you rarely realise you’re heading in a new direction until you’re already hurtling down it, about to be asked to commit to the route or take the next exit. Traditionally, Christen has slowed the car to a crawl and waited out the exit sign, taking the out at the very last moment.

Once, when they were impossibly young, sitting back in the seats of Tobin’s car, basking in the glow of a lowering sun, highway lights not yet doing anything to aid anyone's vision, but glowing insistently all the way down, Tobin had turned left on the recommendation of a sign. The map in Christen’s hands had insisted that they were supposed to stay straight, something that she’d pointed out anxiously once they were already 20 minutes down the new route. Tobin had just shrugged easily, as if it didn’t matter, saying ‘we’ll get there eventually’, before fiddling with the dials of the radio and whistling along to a frankly awful country song. 

They’d been driving to Portland with everything they owned in boxes on the backseat. Driving away in what Christen imagined at the time to be the final scene of the movie about their great love. Into the sunset and the happily ever after. All that came next was wish fulfilment and epilogue. Christen had been equal parts enamoured and distraught. 

She couldn’t have known that she’d drive the same path back out with all of her own things in the backseat, the things separated out entirely from Tobin’s, a dividing of assets checked over by divorce lawyers and her own sentimentality. Thoroughly reliant on the street lights to guide her out of the city. Caught up in the cyclone of ‘for worse’ that came in unanswered questions and ill placed thoughts. Couldn’t have possibly imagined it.

It has become something of a pattern in her life, that the path you think you’re on, the one you assume must be your final and only direction, is not the one you’re miles down. How Christen had thought that she would be a human rights lawyer until she was starting at her third civil disputes firm. How Christen had never even considered any path that didn’t include her mother, even after she got sick, unable to imagine how she could keep driving if she wasn’t in the passenger seat, providing directions. How Christen has never been able to imagine a world that still holds love that matters without Tobin. How she had decided she would be just fine on her own, until Tobin had kissed her and she realised she’d never be content. 

Until Christen realised she was hurtling towards a crash without having knowingly started the car. 

She turns her car left, away from her route to her house, and on to the street leading to Tobin. Leading either to home or to the end of all things. Christen would die for answers to questions that are killing her. 

Almost six years ago, when the world was a place with frustration and failure and personal insignificance, Christen had accused Tobin of sleeping with a girl on her road trip. 

She had been lonely and terrified so much of the time back then. Pacing their home and leaning by the window to pass the time, wanting and waiting and unsure. Constantly waiting for Tobin to come home and for Christen to have permission to be whole again. Now Tobin never comes home and Christen lives in that feeling every day. 

To this day, Christen doesn’t know why she’d said it. She hadn’t believed it, but what is truth to hurt, and what was trust to pain. They had been fighting for days. On and on, seemingly unending. Tobin stormed out and returned loaded with new ammunition twice. Christen had watched her go and tried to figure out how it was that they were the same people in the same room that they had been a year ago, and yet everything was different.

Christen has that feeling all the time now too.

Tobin had looked at her across the kitchen with an expression that made Christen want to take it back right then, right there. She had looked at Christen like the end of the world.

The wind had smashed out the glass of the window, cutting each of them with the force of a thousand cuts, and Tobin had stared at her. The flood ripped up their roots and dragged them off, and Tobin had stared at her. The Tornado came and went, the Tsunami did its worst, the earthquake shattered their shining city, and Tobin had stared at her. 

And then she’d yelled. 

They had snapped and cried and threw plates at the walls until their neighbours had called the police for a domestic dispute. Tobin had looked at her over her shoulder as she opened the door to the Police, and Christen had never felt more hated. More lowly and despised, even in a week where her boss had told her she likely had no future in law and they’d both come and gone from an argument that felt like it would never end. 

Christen had looked at her, the crackling of Police radio filling a home that had once been the only room in the world she was sure she could always come back to the embrace of, and thought: What have we done? Who are we now? Why are we here? 

Tobin had mumbled that she’d be suspended if either of them were charged, if anyone even knew. Christen had told her they weren’t going to be charged because they yelled in the privacy of their own home and Mrs Albert was a homophobic old woman who didn’t like them and never would based purely on her political views. Tobin had cut her a seething look. Christen had reminded her that her entire career could end on a dime if she was so much as taken in for questioning. Tobin shrugged, as if that hardly mattered. As if Christen hardly mattered.

She doesn’t know who they were back then. It had felt like trying desperately to grasp onto something determined to throw itself from the highest point it could reach. It was like looking through a memory of someone else’s life. Surely she’d never accuse someone like that. Surely she would never let it escalate when she knew the mature thing would be to take a breath and have a discussion about the emotion, without the accusation. 

Christen had asked Tobin to go to therapy that night, after the police had told them to have a glass of water and settle down, before leaving, bored by the whole experience. Tobin had looked back at her and said; _‘you’re just not worth the effort, anymore, Chris.’_

Six months and more muted, stewing, bubbling fights later, Christen had left. Tobin didn’t call for hours. When she finally did, Christen blocked her number and resolved to move on.

That was it. That was the end of their marriage. The grand Colosseum of their betrayals. The cruelty of the fighting pits and the injustice of her escape from Rome. It seems so fucking petty when she thinks about it, which she only does every hour of every day these days. It had even at the time. Had seemed so insignificant compared to the enormity of their love, or what Christen had believed their love to be. Her Dad had told her to call Tobin and talk it out with sad, pitiful eyes. Ali had suggested Christen sleep on the decision. Tobin had said nothing at all. One call after hours and nothing beyond. 

Back then, Christen had entertained idyllic daydreams, imagined Tobin bursting through the door, professing love and apologising for it all. They’d fall into each other's arms and live forever in the peace of keeping what you love. Christen would forgive her just as certainly as she was forgiven. Love would conquer all. Tobin never came, and so Christen stopped talking about it, just insisted it was the right decision for as long as the people around her bothered to ask. Tobin showed up five years later without comment, and they didn’t talk about it, because words didn’t capture how the end had _felt_. 

It had been easier in the abstract. When the anger eased and the pain dimmed. When she could think of the eight years that she’s slept by her side and lived in a daydream before she crushed it unknowingly and watched it shatter for the last time. The eight years she could never deny but would never speak of. Tobin was an idea as much as she was a person that Christen had hurt far more than she could admit. Tobin was a centrepoint as much as she was someone who had left Christen in tatters to an extent neither of them could understand. 

Tobin was the touchstone that was forever out of reach. One she wasn’t allowed to touch even if she had been accessible to her. So Christen had continued on, aimless, every map she’d ever held burnt to unrecognisable ashes. 

Then she’d come back. Then she’d eased her way down the electric aisles of a grocery store and held Christen’s past and present and looked at her with knowledge, the same knowledge Christen blinked back with, and there was no abstract. There were sharp lines and too dark colours and a single vivacious I’ve missed you. There was so much confusion in the picture, but all of it led back to that single point. 

  
Except, Christen loves Tobin like a burn all over her body, the only balm held in her arms, and she wants to know why Tobin didn’t feel the same. Why it wasn’t enough. She wants to know, because she thinks the flood took a little bit of her own soul, a piece meant to be seperate from Tobin, with it, and she needs it back.

When Tobin opens her front door, looking like a perfect storm, the expression Christen had torn from her all those years ago appears for half a second, before she can soothe it into something panicked but kind. She looks as confused and hurt as Christen feels. The phantom sting of the glass that shattered in the windows littering them both.

Christen loves her. She hates her. She wants to know why Tobin seemingly didn’t feel enough of either to give it a go. She wants to scream. She wants to fall into her arms in a world where this is as easy as breathing. There’s no real air in her lungs, though, still burning up her throat, and how did she do this, how did you depend on people who didn’t need you at all? She doesn’t want to serve her heart on a platter, but it’s not her hand holding it, anyway. 

“Why did you say it?” Christen snaps, Tobin’s mouth half open in an attempt at greeting. The porch light flickers, and Christen thinks she must look as wild as she feels. 

“What? Chris-” She starts, shaking her head like she’s trying to shake water from her ears. She’s wearing a college t-shirt. It burns behind Christen’s retinas. Or maybe that's the tears. Christen used to wear that shirt all the time. So much so that Tobin complained that people must think she was the one that was stealing it. Christen had afforded it only a cursory glance when she left. 

“You said I wasn’t worth the effort. Why?” She demands, not giving Tobin the space to finish whatever platitude she was trying to come up with. 

Tobin blinks at her, sighs, and pushes the door open wider to let Christen in. A vague part of Christen thinks she probably shouldn’t cross any threshold Tobin offers. Thinks that it’ll only make it sting more when she has to leave. At her hesitation, Tobin quirks an eyebrow, Christen steps through the door and listens as Tobin shuts it behind her.

“I told you. It was complicated.” Tobin sighs, leaning her back against the front door, almost as if she’s barricading it. Like that will stop the damage. Tobin’s house opens immediately into an open plan kitchen living area and Christen stands loosely in the space, not sure how to come and not go. There’s a half finished painting propped against the wall, an angry swirl of green the same shade as Christen’s eyes and the orange and reds of a fire. 

It isn’t good enough. Christen knows things were complicated in the end. Knows because she lived it just as surely as Tobin did. Remembers the many things said in anger that she couldn’t explain under a microscope, but this one can’t be a part of that collection. It can’t, because Christen has been thinking about it every second since it had left Tobin’s mouth. Christen had given up on her marriage for that sentence. She thinks about it too much for it to just be another thing between them. 

It's a question that nips at the heels of her every step. It’s set into the ink of her signature on the paperwork for the closing of their joint account. It tears at the seams of the clothes she’s bought without knowing what Tobin would’ve thought of them. It’s written into the mortgage of Christen’s lonely house. It lines every vowel and drips at every sentence she’s said around Tobin since she showed up in a pre-made salad section of Christen’s favourite grocery store. She can’t keep asking and asking and asking. 

“Tobin, why?” it's meant to be insistent, but it comes out a little broken. 

“I don’t know.” Tobin says, shrugging like it's nothing. Like she hadn’t even considered the words when they left her mouth or at any point afterwards. Tobin has an appearance of flippancy in most things. Christen used to be able to tell when it was real and when it was fake. She isn’t sure what she can tell about Tobin anymore.

She used to look at Tobin and know every thought that was crossing her mind. Could see bad days in the slope of her shoulders and good ones in the brush of her fingers. She knew when Tobin was hungry by the way her lip would pout and eyebrows furrow. Knew when she was best left alone and best pushed. Knew when she was about to say ‘I love you’ to the point that Christen wasn’t sure they even needed to say it. It was so clear in her eyes. It was a wasted collection of understanding for so long, but she treasured it unwillingly and without avail. 

For a moment, just a brief one, Christen had thought that maybe it was serving a purpose again. When she looked at Tobin’s face and saw ‘I still get you’, or ‘our friends are annoying’, or ‘I am not leaving, not like you did.’ She thought she could see all of it all over again. Now she doesn’t know what she was reading and what she was creating. 

“Well, you should.” Christen snaps. 

Tobin’s jaw clenches. “Are we having this conversation, Chris? For real.” 

“Yes” Christen says it with all the breath she has left in her body, her chest heaving under the weight of them, of this. The crescendo growing in her ears, a buzz she hopes is in Tobin too. 

Christen thinks that maybe they are finally going to do this, once and for all, and she doesn’t blame the slightly disbelieving look that crosses Tobin’s face. The last time they had a conversation like this Christen was 26, tied to an anchor beneath the surface, grounded and drowning. The last time they’d had a conversation like this she’d been a very different person. She suspects Tobin probably was too. She isn’t sure. She doesn’t know which way she wants the cards to fall. If she wants to cling to the familiar Tobin or seek the possible new one. Isn’t sure which will hurt more. 

When they had gotten married Tobin’s parents had written ‘never go to bed angry’ in their guest book among a collage of other advice from other well meaning people. They’d flicked through those pages and suggestions with the arrogance of people who loved each other undeniably and with untested reverence. Christen hadn’t been able to conceptualise a world where she could be angry with Tobin into the evenings, and so she hadn’t felt a need to hold the advice too close to her heart. Then, she’d looked around one night, as if in a dream, and it was the evening, and she was angry at Tobin and Tobin didn’t care. The sun never really came up again. 

“Why’d you leave?” Tobin says, harsh, eyes lifting from the floorboard beneath her feet and settling on Christen’s. They’re burning. Flames licking higher and higher, searing the roof and lashing at the containment of the room. 

If Christen is the flood staining the walls irrevocably, sweeping them away and dragging apart their direction, Tobin is the forest fire they can’t contain, the slowly burning match left too near kerosene. They’re the smoke on the water. 

Christen blinks at her. “What?”

“You get your question, I get mine.” Tobin says it like it's the most logical conclusion in the world. Christen hardly agrees. “Why’d you leave?” 

“You told me I didn’t matter, Tobin.” Christen can’t help the way her voice rises, waving wildly between them. 

Tobin hums, passive, but Christen wouldn’t have to have spent nine years learning every flicker on her face to know that she doesn’t feel as idle as she portrays herself. “So you left me, you ended our marriage, you decided nine years of our lives were just a waste of your time, because I misspoke?”

“Well when you frame it like that-”

“ _How else am I meant to frame it, Christen_?” The damn breaks, Tobin’s voice raising. Christen doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t know that she’s wrong. She doesn’t know that either of them are right. She thinks maybe she should’ve listened to her Dad. “You didn’t explain yourself, you gave me your lawyers number and didn’t answer my calls.” 

Somewhere out there, in a softer world, where water is always lukewarm and they float in it for days at a time. Where rain comes to feed crops and freshen skin, but storms stay far away. Where youth isn’t wasted so much as gifted to the young, Christen would’ve stayed. She never would’ve thought to have left. Christen spends a lot of time wondering about the possibility of if she had just stayed, if she would’ve just stuck it out. It never occurred to her that Tobin did too. 

“You left. I was trying, then I came home from a road trip, thinking we would be able to talk and move past it and you were gone. I know I fucked up, alright? I know, because I’ve been thinking about it every day for five years, but Chris, you just left me. And I- I don’t even… What was I supposed to do with that?” Tobin dips her head back against the door as she speaks, the fight draining from her in a moment.

“You were meant to come after me” Christen snaps, she doesn’t want the fight to drain. If the fight is done then Tobin is back to impassive and defeated. Christen had torn herself up over that once before, she’s not allowing it a second time. 

“You can’t hold me to that! You can’t be upset that I respected you not wanting me around anymore.” Tobin says, fight flickering back up for a moment, eyes flashing, jaw twitching. Christen had wanted the fight, but she hates the sigh that follows it as Tobin’s head drops back down. And Christen has nothing to say to what is a very fair point. 

None of it feels anything like before. She doesn’t love Tobin like before, like hellfire and the relentlessness of finding something you’ve never had, of finding a focus point as the world tries to redirect your attention. Furious, terrifying, catapulting. That’s gone. Now, she loves Tobin like home. 

“It hurt, what you said, it still hurts.” Christen says. She doesn’t want to fight her anymore. She still doesn’t have her answer. 

“I’m sorry, Chris. I just wish you would’ve said that, you know? I would’ve tried to fix it then. I was so out of my depth with you.” She says, pushing herself up off the door and crossing the room to sit on the edge of the couch. “But you hurt me too.”

Tobin looks so tired. Something in her muscle memory wants to hold her, but she thinks it would only sting, so she holds back. Keeps her arms tight against her side as Tobin rubs a hand across her eyes and pushes it up to rest on her forehead. 

“I know, leaving-” Christen is cut off by Tobin shaking her head at her firmly. She can’t help the wrinkle of confusion on her forehead.

“You know you stopped saying you loved me, right?” Tobin is smiling, a distant twitch of her lips as she looks past Christen. It’s the smile she used to wear after bad games. After the World Cup the US lost, when they went out afterwards and Tobin was insistent that she was fine. When her world was collapsing in on itself but she was determined to prop it up all alone.

Christen doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. “I told you I loved you all the time.”

“After I wouldn’t go to therapy with you, after…” Tobin waves vaguely at her, the ‘after I explained my reasoning with a comment that has you in my living room five years later like a woman possessed’, going unsaid but loud between them, “You only said it twice after that. And then you were gone, and I mean, I guess I should’ve expected it.” 

Oh. Christen hadn’t said much of anything to Tobin after that point. Waited out the moments she was home until she’d be gone again. Constantly waiting for the pressure of someone expecting love and acting as if they had any for you, while their haunted words echoed your mind, to be alleviated. 

It hadn’t been deliberate silence. She’d loved her still. She loved her long after. She still loves her. 

How in the hell had neither of them managed to say any of this before they got all the way down this road? Why hadn’t Christen taken her face in her hands and not said ‘ _I love you so much sometimes I can’t handle it, I love you and I am terrified, because you don’t seem to want me like this, but I am always going to want you this way.’_ The simple answer was hurt. The complex one fills the space between them. The storm rages on.

Christen could give you a list of things that make her fallible. Things for which she should be held to account for. About two thirds of the list relate to Tobin. About two thirds of everything in her life comes back to Tobin. All roads lead home, after all. She thinks her path is perhaps that from a cautionary tale in a children's book. All jagged edges and disorienting purples. Winding up and up and up until it gets to the sunlight of Tobin at the end. 

Children's fairy tales always end in sunlight breaking through. Christen doesn’t live in a fairytale, though. Sometimes the sun burns out, sometimes home doesn’t want anything to do with you. Sometimes your ex wife hates you just as agonisingly as you love her. Dead things don’t always stay buried, that doesn’t mean they get another chance to live. Oh, but how she wants them to. 

She wants to give the remaining tendrils of her air to them. Wants Tobin by her side in the resuscitation. Needs to see what revival can mean. 

“I’m not pretending to be innocent.” Christen says, because she doesn’t think falling to her knees and repenting for her various sins is the appropriate reaction to that barb. Also, because she has to say something, and she’s eager to form the words before Tobin gets in first. 

They know each other well enough to soothe their various wounds. They know each other well enough to know just where to inflict them.

“Christen, if I wasn’t trying I wouldn’t be here.” Tobin says. Her shoulders are still tense, her jaw stiff, but as she sits herself on the edge of the couch she looks restrained. Barely holding back, but carefully holding on. 

Not all that long ago, she would’ve said something cruel and stormed off by now, leaving Christen with no indication of where she’d gone and when she’d be back, or if she would be at all. Now, she almost looks as if she has it together. 

Christen figures there's probably some merit in the statement. She still wants her own answers, though. She’s sick of wracking through self help books and blogs to try and find them. Some people disappear from your life without explanation, you were meant to let them go, let your rhyme and reason be independent of theirs, or so the experts say. Christen has a lot of experience in the sharp end of departure and she’s come to the conclusion that there are some people you ought to hunt down and demand they explain their reasoning to you.

“Then answer my question.” She says, firmly. She sounds like she’s giving the jury her closing statement, hammering down the last point, assuring them of guilt or innocence or the green hue of the sky or whatever else it is she’s being paid to make them think. No one is paying her anything for whatever she achieves here, but she’s sure she’ll pay for it every second for the rest of her life if no explanation results of it. 

Tobin looks so tired. Something in her muscle memory wants to hold her. She keeps her arms tight against her side as Tobin rubs a hand across her eyes and pushes it up to rest on her forehead. 

“I don’t have the answer you want, Chris.” Tobin sighs, after a long moment. “Ok? I can tell you I was scared, because the only person I had ever really loved thought I was cheating on them, and I was angry, and yeah, maybe I wanted to hurt you the way you hurt me. And I know that was wrong, alright? I tried to fix it, but you were already gone. You were done with me after that.” 

“You should’ve come after me.” Christen whispers like a last hoorah. Tobin smiles at her sadly.

“You shouldn’t have left.” and, yeah. 

That’s the final point of it all. Where they’ll always end up, as long as the destination they have plotted remains what it is. No matter which route they take, if it's maps or signs. Stranger's directions or your best friend's instincts. That there isn’t an answer to Christen’s question anymore than there's an answer to Tobin’s. Christen left because she was scared and hurt, and that’s not enough of an explanation for the dismantling of Tobin’s life. Tobin said what she said because she was scared and hurt, and that isn’t enough of an explanation for the derailing of Christen’s life. 

Tobin’s attempt at a smile is gone. The longing sadness in her eyes remains, dark humour toying behind warm eyes. She’s beautiful, even like this. She thinks Tobin is someone new. Something she hasn’t seen grown the way she wishes she would’ve. Someone who came to LA when her life was changing because she was seeking the thing that was more important than the past. Christen wants to know every story she has to tell and every tear she’s ever shed. Christen never wants to go anywhere ever again. 

There isn’t an answer that explains any of it well enough. Christen still thinks she has her answer, though. It’s Tobin. It’s always Tobin.

“I love you.” She says. Tobin looks at her quickly, lips falling open, eyes baring her soul. Christen has missed it so much. 

“You don’t have to-” she starts, cautious, standing, hesitating in the step between them. 

“I don’t know what happens now.” Christen says, blinking at her, at the floorboards that stretch between them. The space has never been so small. Tobin smiles at her sadly.

“Whatever you want.” she says, and Christen knows she means it. Means it in a way the two of them have seldom meant anything. Self sacrificially and selfishly all at the same time. 

“Were you like, stalking me, when we saw each other in the supermarket?” Christen asks. It’s not exactly the important question, Christen would still like an answer. Tobin laughs, surprised, breathy and relieved. Christen smiles just watching her.

“Nah, I was hoping I’d see you when I moved out here, but I didn't like, follow you” She says, shaking her head. “I figured we’d end up here eventually, one way or another. It’s one of those things. Magnets can be on their own for a while, but they get too close and it's like, you know, swoosh.” 

“Swoosh?” Christen raises her eyebrows, Tobin nods, sheepish but dedicated to the bit. 

“Yeah. Swoosh.” She says. Christen snorts, takes the last step remaining between them. 

She’s ridiculous, and Christen loves her for it. Loves the fact that she knows what she means, feels it right down to her bones. That it’s exactly how she’s felt all this time. Magnets separated by thousands of miles and hurtful words. Getting by just fine on paper. Functioning, sticking with things that worked. But forever that draw, that pull. That someone, somewhere, was tugging you back, still holding the final piece of your purpose. The distance closed, the pull got stronger, irresistible. Until you were in the house your ex bought five years on, that looks a little too much like the house you dreamed up together when you were younger and bolder, when you spoke for eons but never communicated much beyond silent pleas of ‘I understand you, please understand me’, telling her all the ways she hurt you, as she tells you all the ways you hurt her. 

Tobin isn’t the only one who knows Christen, but she’s the only one Christen cares to be drawn to, across years, across healing, across scars and stars and significance and failings. She’s the only one who could stand in front of her and say ‘swoosh’ without irony and have it mean absolutely as much as ‘I love you.’ 

“It’s late, Chris.” Tobin mutters, fingers hovering over Christen's wrist like she wants to hold on, wants something to tether them together. Christen pushes her arm up so it brushes Tobin’s fingers. It’s the only grounding point left in a night Christen didn’t think she would be able to stand. “Will you stay?”

Tobin doesn’t look at her, her eyes still fixed on where her fingers are brushing at Christen’s wrist. The words too much, too much, too much rush her brain. She soothes them back down with swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. It's a damning question. She knows if she leaves, the door will still be opened for her entrance when she comes back, but it’ll be guarded. She knows if she leaves, she’ll watch Tobin’s face crumple the way she never wants to see ever again. Christen doesn’t want to leave anywhere Tobin is ever again. She knows she’ll have to, but she’s never going anywhere they can’t come back from again so long as Tobin is waiting on a return. 

“Yeah. I’ll stay.” it's a whisper between them, but Tobin’s contained smile is a roar. 

Christen knows it’s the right decision. Knows it as sure as she knows her name, as sure as she knows that the sky is blue, as sure as she knows that they’re going to hurt each other a thousand times over. As sure as she knows that she never wants to leave her heart this open without Tobin to protect it. She has only a handful of answers, but she has a list of reasoning that says ‘Tobin’ all the way down. 

As she brushes her teeth with the toothbrush Tobin tears from a sealed packet under her sink, using a butter knife to break the plastic when she fails to rip off enough cardboard, she knows. As she changes out of her nicest ‘I don’t to be here but I feel obligated to be’ dress and into the track pants and shirt Tobin offers, she knows. As she lays down next to Tobin, despite repeated assurance Tobin was happy to take the couch, only conceding when Christen had sighed ‘Tobe, lay down’, the sheets and her clothes and Tobin all smelling so familiar and painfully distant, she knows.

She came wanting Tobin to yell, but it's a whisper when her eyes blink through the darkness and she says “Please don’t leave.”

“Mean it when you say it.” Christen says back. The storm rattles the windows, the waves rising at the walls. There's so much ground uncovered, so much clarity sorely lacking. Tobin nods in the darkness and it ruffles the sheets. 

There’s mountains of blankets and rivers of space in between them on the bed, but they’re facing each other, features almost obscured in the dark. Almost, because Christen would know Tobin anywhere, in any light. Sunlight and streetlights. 

If they survive the storm, if they wake up tomorrow, Christen thinks she’s going to be okay. She thinks they’re both going to be alright, one way or another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr softnoirr if you'd like to chat, messages in any form are most welcome and most appreciated.


	9. A thousand funerals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be."  
> \- Heidi Priebe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps I am considering adding five chapters to this for some pure self indulgent wish fulfilment and fluff. Perhaps. 
> 
> We're close to me making good on that 'happy ending' tag, though, which includes loving and being happy with your own self! 
> 
> Stay safe out there xx

The sea goes in and out, and the storm calls off its parade of destruction. The town emerges to look around, and Christen can almost breathe. She hadn’t been sure she’d ever take another breath, but when she wakes, it’s far too much air to handle all at once. It floods her nose, wraps around her throat. Shattering in its significance, like walking through the fiercest wind you’ve ever seen and trying to keep the conversation alive. She can’t breathe for how easy the air is to come by, she can’t love for how enormous it is to find it sleep beside her, can’t run for how tethered she is.

She feels like someone has snipped away at each tendon in her legs one by one. Taken a sharp blade to the cartilage, muscle and bone that keeps her on two feet, torn at them with smooth lines and ragged breath. She’s not sure she’ll ever stand again. It makes her want to walk. Someone has gone swimming in her blood and cave diving in her heart, torn her limb for limb, seen every tissue and organ and began stitching her spleen to her lung and her liver to her foot. No rhyme, no reason, clean cuts that present a farce of care but have disordered her completely. 

When she was a teenager, she’d fight with her parents at 4pm and eat dinner with them at 7pm. Scream ‘I hate you’ and slam the door shut on their anguish, an hour later thank them for dinner and tell them about her homework. Even then the strangeness of it had struck her. As if she had imagined the conflict, forgetting it as the clock ticked by. She had never known the feeling her parents were having on the other side of the table. The pain of someone you love despising you one moment and relying on you the next. Then she’d watched a marriage crumble before her, and she’d recognised it. She’d called her Dad and apologised for her youth so adamantly he’d asked if everything was alright. She had said yes, and she doubts he had believed her. 

She’s not sure how to go on in the wake of the end of all things. You can’t unsend texts or un-call or unask or unanswer. You can’t change your mind on an ‘I love you’ that passed your lips before you thought too much about it. Well, you can. You can, and it gets you cruel discussions across the room and painful silence. Someone's chest broken and bleeding in front of you. It's cruel and callous and not so easy as it's meant to be. Sometimes it’s easier, in the end, to stick with your honesty and the swirling ink that settles in your stomach, than it is to leave.

Christen hasn’t woken up with a hand splayed across her waist and someone else’s hair tickling her nose in years. Christen hasn’t woken up to such peace in even longer. The sheets aren’t as high a thread count as the ones on her own bed, but the mattress is nicer, and the smell of someone else’s shampoo, the same brand she smells every time she sees it on the shelf of a supermarket but never buys, all around her. It feels like home. 

The walls are a light grey, looking impossibly dark against the bright white ceiling Christen stares up at. A change of perspective changing the colour completely. The sheets drag on the legs she hasn’t shaved in a few days as she shifts. Some of Tobin’s shoes are scattered about, a strange pattern on the floor board. She almost expects to see holes in the wall, her tears from the night before flooding through the door. There’s no evidence of a shift. No evidence of anything beyond the sun rising for yet another morning. 

And it's terrifying. Utterly free falling and petrifying. She could die without cause, right here, and the coroner would write nothing on his report but ‘coward.’ 

A part of her wants to extract herself from under the sheets and sneak out the front door, a kiss on the pillow, her heart on the counter. Tobin’s grip on her is predictive and prohibitive of this urge, only tightening as Christen becomes more awake. She loves her, but she’s so, so scared. Scared in a way she never has been before.

Tobin had said ‘whatever you want.’ But Christen honest to God doesn’t know what that is. She wants with enough force to burn up the sun and eat the whole world without pause. She wants until she aches, but she doesn’t know what. In the part of her brain that has been an adult for some time, has seen her friends love and loose, love and grow, has seen herself love and destroy, care and loose faith, she thinks that wanting with unconcentrated force is perhaps among the more dangerous things she could attempt in this life. 

Moreover, she doesn’t have a single clue what she needs. Tobin, probably. In some form. Tobin six years ago, and maybe now, but mostly, she thinks she needs to take a breath without blizzard force winds sweeping under her nose and flattening her lungs. Tobin sleeps beside her, and Christen isn’t sure what to do with the toxicity she can feel in her bloodstream. 

“Morning” Tobin’s voice is as sleep rumpled and raw as it has always been in the mornings, familiar and yet jarring. Something out of time. Christen loves Tobin, she doesn’t really know how to be around her with that in the air, anymore. 

Tobin has lived in her head for so long. A silent homage to the idea of love and her belief in fate. Everything was held to the standard of ‘Tobin Heath: love of my life, breaker of hearts, destruction of my universe.’ It had become the focal point, her lens through which to understand everything. She circled back to Tobin in all things, from her choice in partners to her job to her stagnation. Everything had started and ended there. She doesn’t know how to hold Tobin against herself. Has no clue how she figures out her next step when the path is permanently frozen over. 

Christen clears her throat. “I should go.” 

It feels true: that single ‘should.’ Christen knows can’t, won’t and should and shouldn’t like the back of her hand. Knows she had to come but shouldn’t stay. Knows the sentiment of I can’t do this so clearly and so intimately it was like it had been made just for her. Like nobody in the world knows the feeling of a take back so much as she does. Everything feels more violent in the storm, and so every answer seems simpler. 

When the world feels like its ending, you’ll say almost anything. Every affliction you have falling from your tongue. That primal all consuming, all ending instinct that insists you bare your soul for all the world, or all of your personal world, to see. They weren’t mistruths, but they were things so intrinsic and base you almost don’t realise you feel them. Not until they hung in the air around you, the end of the world caught in the eye of the storm. Christen wasn’t sure which eons old ancestor had felt so strongly that people were meant to speak and to share that they ensured that little piece was wired in their souls thereafter, but she doesn’t thank them for it. Doesn’t particularly appreciate that when the world is ending, nobody feels like themselves.

Some things were so ingrained into you, you forget they exist. Christen feels that way about white picnic baskets from her childhood. About why she chose law as her major. About why she sought education in the first place. Why she loves her parents and her sisters, and why time and distance and mourning clothes will never change that tense. Why she measures all things by Tobin and why she hates mangoes. LA, Portland, and the spaces that feel beyond cities and nearer to something cerebral and transcendent were a part of it. They’re base, so self explanatory you could never put them into words. They were the things poets wrote about even in long dead languages and forms of English they were beginning to forget. They were the things you said without feeling when the world was knocking on your door and tapping at it’s wrist. 

Point is; sometimes you don’t know how to emote for the things you feel so deeply they’re less feeling and more anatomical. Another limb, one you never use but feel just as attached to. Christen isn’t a scientist, she can’t explain the causes. She’s a lawyer. They have as much a reputation for stuffy language use as they do for being parasitic. Christen doesn’t want to be a parasite on Tobin’s life. She doesn’t want to think of Tobin as one on hers. So she says ‘I should go’, and what she means is ‘I need to try and feel the parts of us that are lodged into the tissue we slit into last night so I remember to love you after the storm.’ 

She’s not sure that Tobin hears that. She isn’t sure that anyone could ever hear that. But Tobin nods against her shoulder, and she looks sort of sad, but it's better than angry, and Christen will take that. 

It's silent in the room. A car passes outside. Tobin clears her throat and asks, “Do you want to?” 

Christen doesn’t know what she wants, she thinks her ability to know things is somewhere down a freeway. She thinks it's buried with her Mother, or in one of the boxes she packed up in her Dad’s attic when she left Tobin. She thinks it’s in the conversations she hasn’t been having with Ali, in the calls she lets ring out and the plans she’s blown off. She thinks it’s probably in job applications she backspaced her way through. She doesn’t want to leave, per say, but she knows that if she stays she’ll bleed out right here on Tobin’s mattress. Wanting is buried, but they aren’t, and Christen can find a shovel, somewhere, hidden in the back of her Dad’s garden. 

“I’m going to come back. We can talk.” she says, instead of the novel she’s writing in her head about it. She needs to book in with her therapist, probably. She’s been blowing her off and lying about things for too long. “I just, I need a second to not hurt you. You’ve been figuring it out and I was still denying, and, I think I need a second.”

Christen dares to look at Tobin then. She’s blinking back at her, a little sleepy around the eyes, but attentive. Nodding vaguely against the pillow. Christen hasn’t been this close to her, distance or otherwise, in years, and it’s enough to provide her the energy for as reassuring a smile as she can muster. Tobin’s lips twitch to meet it. 

“I get that.” her voice is like relief, her skin like honey. 

“I think I’m going to quit my job.” Christen adds, more afterthought than anything else. Tobin exhales in something nearing laughter, her smile spreading a little wider. 

“Yeah, me too.” She says, twinkle in her eye that Christen knows means she’s excited to watch someone laugh at her joke, no matter how dumb it is. 

Christen presses her head back into the too firm pillow and gives her exactly what she wants, laughter far disproportionate to the quality of lazy morning retirement themed humour. Tobin laughs along with her, though, eyes watching Christen like it might be the last time she gets to see her this way. It’s that that reminds Christen she’s certainly coming back, to break the tide or to swim in it, she isn’t yet sure which. 

She pushes herself out of the bed, though, carefully moving the sheets so Tobin’s side goes undisrupted. Tobin watches her, flat on her back, hands behind her head. She’s got the ghost of a smile on her lips, only a shadow, but searing as it follows Christen as she collects her things. 

“What are you gonna do today, Chris?” she asks, like she knows nobody has asked Christen that in a long time. Christen still doesn’t know how Tobin just seems to know. 

Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s just as lost as Christen. All their maps have been burnt up, all the road signs taken down. She still asks, though, and she can’t know how nice it is that she does.

“I am not sure yet.” She says, shrugging, for once not too concerned by it. She feels a little like a dead woman walking, dragging her rearranged organs out of the surgeon’s office without knowing the cause or effect. She feels a little warmth back in her chest. “Don’t miss me too much.” She tells her, pausing at the door. Tobin snorts.

“I will.” She says, voice raising enough to be heard as Christen shuts the door to the bedroom behind her. Christen smiles and leaves. She’s coming back this time. There’s ease in that. Even if she feels like there's a trail of blood following her out the door. 

  
  


*

She sets the navigation in her car to her Dad’s house without even thinking about it. Decides to let the deep seated knowing guide her until she knows better. If she ever knows better. She hadn’t had access to this part of herself for so long, she figures the least she can do is trust it a little.

The drive to her Dad’s is long enough to let her think, short enough she doesn’t make it more than five songs and incessant chatter through a radio broadcast. Christen stops at her own house to change, doesn’t need to arrive on the doorstep of her childhood home in her ex wife's clothes, her own too nice dress draped over her arm, tear-tracks lining her eyes and streaking her makeup. That would be a can of worms she couldn’t close back up again. It’s one she’s endeavouring to explain without the need for evidence. She thinks, when it comes to things like this, it’s probably to tell and not show how far out of control you’ve managed to spiral. 

The road is long and winding, the traffic dense, but when Christen pulls up outside her Dad’s house, the wind eases it’s pressure on her lungs a little. It feels almost a little too easy, considering how rearranged and untethered from the world she is. Supposes family and memory is like that. Un in the air constantly and yet forever the only tangible thing you can, mostly, trust to always be there. Distorted, occasionally, lacking the full picture and the full story, overwhelmed by the unique bias that love tends to bring, but a place to come back to, time and time again. 

When she was younger, she dug up worms in this front garden. Peeked through the mailbox and pretended it was a telescope she could point to the sky. Uncaring of the possibility of splinters or strangers. She conjured stories of knights and castles, battlefields and possums that could talk, pieces of lego that formed who worlds and a single leaf that was an ancient scroll containing all the wisdom in the world. The unrestrained suspension of belief that existed before the very first test of faith was something she would forever be longing for a return to. That very first lens that trusted and screamed without care for who heard so long as they screamed back. 

Christen thinks about being that young all the time, before anyone told her she shouldn’t be. She used to have big dreams. She thinks, when she falls asleep tonight, a little piece of them might creep back in. Remembered or not, she has hope that the little girl she can almost see rolling around in the dirt with her sisters will visit her, give her a little direction. If Tobin can be patient and gentle and forgiving, if Christen can be forgiving without a full or expected answer, then maybe the world is still a little more infinite than she’s been giving it credit for. 

Her Dad opens the door dressed in an apron that says ‘kiss the cook’ and an expression that says ‘I’ve missed you.’ He pulls her into a hug before she can find the words to match the sentiment. Laughing in her ear and rubbing big circles into her back without pause. Christen feels months of tension dissipate under her skin, one of her mismatched organs returning to its proper place.

“Hey, Daddy” she says into his shoulder, muffled by his shirt and his affection. She can smell his omelette burning in the kitchen, but neither of them break the hug.

“Chrissy, sweetheart it’s so good to see you.” he sighs into her head. Christen squeezes him a little tighter in anticipation of the fact that she’s going to have to let go. 

The omelette is burnt beyond repair, but her Dad throws it into the bin without a care, smiling as he goes about making a new batch, enough for the two of them. Christen watches as he cracks the eggs carefully, helps him chop the tomatoes as he instructs her. She’s sure she could do it to restaurant quality in her sleep, after all the years by his shoulder slaving over this particular breakfast, preparing a plate for her Mother and sisters on a Saturday morning, still in her pajamas and ultra careful with every glide of the knife and sizzle of the pan, dedicated to making it perfect. She lets him instruct her anyway without complaint, right down to the hand of her elbow positioning her hands just the right way so as to be efficient and safe; Cody Press’ most sacred rules of any kitchen operation. 

Christen used to imagine doing this with her kids one day. Standing in the kitchen with Tobin, teaching skill and hunger to little hands and attentive faces. She still does, sometimes. Imagines a world where she could have a little house in the suburbs and a home full of laughter and noise and incessant presence without ever growing tired or anxious over it. It seems a while away. It seems nearing on possible. 

They’re damn good omelettes too. Of that, no mistake can be made. Perfectly flavoured, perfectly light, perfectly filling. Perfect despite a creation that had been messy and littered with misshapen vegetable garden tomatoes. They’d had to fish a little bit of egg shell out of the bowl. One of the whisks had its wires all bent out of shape. She remembers looking up at her Dad once, lip trembling, because the preparation had been such a disaster, concerned somewhere in her brain that if the omelette wasn’t perfect, then nothing else could go right all day. He had taken her by the shoulders and said  _ ‘Christen, it isn’t about what you make, it’s about how much fun we had making it. You can taste the fun no matter what. _ ’ She’d blinked back tears and nodded up at him as he patted her head. The omelette had tasted as good as it always did, and Cody had insisted that fun was his secret ingredient. Christen suspected it was Chives and a dash of Paprika, but fun worked as well. Better, maybe.

They eat their breakfast at the dining table on the good plates, despite Christen’s insistence he doesn’t need to put in that kind of effort for her. They talk about his vegetable garden and the concept of companion planting that he’s been reading up on. Growing vegetables by flowers. Christen likes the idea of it quite a lot. If she ever looks at reviving the wilting herb garden on her deck she might take a leaf out of his book. Though, the possibility of accidentally adding weeds to her dinner instead of Parsley or Thyme is somewhat concerning. They talk about Christen’s job, and how she thinks she needs to get a new one. Her Dad nods thoughtfully, suggesting she use his computer to write up applications. She doesn’t mention that her computer is probably more reliable, she’s as eager as he is for her to stay. They talk about the books they’ve been reading and the way Christen sometimes feels like she’s completely off track, how Cody sometimes looks to his side and is surprised to find that his wife isn’t there.

Christen knows she should talk more. Pieces of her rearrange every second that she speaks, every word that falls from her mouth explaining a little bit more, not just to her Dad but to herself. It’s calmer than it’s been in a while. The storm held at bay. 

They talk about Tobin. About how she’d appeared like a dream or a nightmare in a grocery store, something haunted and foreign and missed. How she’d smiled and Christen had felt, for a moment, a little more at ease. The way she’d been destabilising. The way she’d picked Christen up and spun her around, and when she put her back down Christen had realised she’d been standing in eight inches of mud. That when she wasn’t around the mud became quicksand, and Christen isn’t sure she can drag herself out of it, but she isn’t sure it's healthy to rely on Tobin to get her out. 

Christen speaks, and her Dad listens, surprise morphing into concerned interest morphing into a softly encouraging smile. He chides her when she mentions her pneumonia, even when Christen insists she was fine, that it wasn’t so serious, it had just felt like death. He laughs when she tells him about the ‘swoosh’ and frowns along with her as she talks about the kiss. About how she wasn’t sure what to feel around Tobin. What was safe. How you kept biting your tongue on things around the person who used to be your secret-keeper. Breakfast is long past when Cody finally squeezes her shoulder and she’s finally run out of things to say about Tobin. 

It’s nice. Not having a Tobin sized weight on her shoulders. She’s had too much, too much, too much for so long the idea of having nothing left to say, no greater love to express or moment to dissect is almost nice. That's all she wrote. Put down the pen on the first and final draft with a nod of satisfaction and smiled. It's foreign and disconcerting, but nice. Like a relative you vaguely remember from when you were very small, with only the slightest outline of memories, who welcomes you like you’re old friends: to them you are. 

“I always liked Tobin, Chrisy, even when I knew you two needed to be apart.” Her Dad says, squeezing her shoulder loosely, rubbing at the knot of tension in it. Christen smiles at him. Everyone always likes Tobin. She’s magnetised, you can’t not. Christen takes some pleasure in knowing that, to Tobin, she's magnetic too. 

“I miss her all the time, Dad. Even now she’s back.” Christen says, swallowing around the lump of memory in her throat. “I don’t know how to stop missing her.”

Her Dad hums, contemplatively, looking out the window. It needs cleaning. Christen will probably find an excuse to help him clean it before she goes home. Wherever that may be in the wake of the storm.

“Maybe you should tell her that, see what happens.” he says, like it's easy. “Sometimes closure is just realising it’s alright if you find another door to the same room. As long as you let the one that wasn’t getting you anywhere close first.”

Christen has been at the same door for so long. Knocking quietly, tapping at the frame, kicking at its hinges. Demanding it open and whispering questions of if the lock is still in place. Even when she was barricading it herself, that tiny wedge of light was always there. It only led to collapse, but she knew there was something inside it that was great. Something to be said for the architecture of a room that lasted forever and a day, even without maintenance. The foundation had to be solid for that.

“It’s going to be okay. With or without her. Because you have a choice now, and all good things start with realising that both choices are there for the taking.” Her Dad smiles at her, encouraging, and Christen nods.

She remembers Tobin in the supermarket. The millionth day in the calendar of Christen and Tobin, but the first in this season. Remembers her nodding at the pre-made salads in her hands and calling her indecisive. Christen had been indecisive in most things. Indecisive in her college. Indecisive in whether or not she wanted Tobin to make a move when they were kids. Indecisive on whether she wanted red or white wine with dinner. She had floundered between salads and people and phases. Had put down both more often than she cared to admit for fear of committing to one. On occasion she hadn’t even bothered to pick either up, knowing it would never lead anywhere. 

They’re so different now. Tobin is so different, has been trying so hard to make it known, in action if not in words. They really need to get better at talking. For someone who has a communications degree Tobin really isn’t that great at just saying what she’s trying to get across. Or maybe Christen is an expert in denial. Perhaps a little bit of both. They’re so achingly different, and still this decision. 

Christen thinks she has an answer ready when next the question is asked, at least. Too little, too late, maybe, but it's better to start again then never at all. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It had never been resurrected before. Never is no reason not to try when your love is so large as this. It would be a disservice to the fixtures to abandon it to the sands of time to examine in a museum and let history pity them. 

They do the dishes together, Christen drying as quickly as she can to keep up with the onslaught of soapy plates and cutlery being handed to her. It was only the two of them, but there are cups from what seems to be days before across the bench and counters, and their cooking dishes seem an inordinate amount. She really has no clue how there got to be such an excessive amount for such a small meal. She doesn’t really mind, though. Just revels in the splash of warm water against glass and the scrape of cutlery against the bottom of the sink. Christen thinks love might be in kitchens. 

When the counters are spotless and the world seems a little simpler than it had half an hour ago, Christen treks down the hall to her Dad’s half study, half storage space, taking him up on that offer of his computer for applications. She leaves the door wide open, inviting him to wander in and out as he pleases. She’s starting to enjoy interruption more than she ever thought possible for something once so despised. 

The list of firms is endless, the ‘apply now’ button infinite. Christen lists out her achievements one by one on application after application, slow to think of them at first, and then never ending. The things she’s done bigger then even those proudest of her could remember. Christen likes the pride in her chest as she types them out. It's been a long time since it's nestled back in with its assurances and smile.

She finds a not for profit seeking a legal advisor. It’s been so long since she did anything but barter for a paycheque. She remembers the impossibility of the world at 27, being so young and feeling like she was all but done. She remembers the loss of Tobin like the ache of a sore tooth you were destined to lose through no fault of your own, wisdom teeth that never grew in quite right. The world seems a little bigger these days, Tobin a little more like a choice than a third lung. She clicks apply. The wind eases from a gust to a breeze. Things grow back in their own time. 

She waters the garden, she sews the seed, she loves Tobin, she lets herself trust in it. 

Her Dad kisses the top of her head when she leaves, rubbing up and down her back. Christen thinks he’s right. Everything is going to turn out okay, because Christen will make sure of it. Maybe Tobin will be there, maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll linger on edges and around corners. Maybe she’ll be solid. Christen doesn’t know. She surrenders to the uncertainty and lets herself smile to the love song on the radio as she heads home. 

The house is the same it's always been. Lonely and too completely her taste, but Christen doesn’t mind so much. She sits on the porch and watches the sunset. Tobin texts her a picture of a painting with T.H in the corner and Christen sends a heart emoji back. 

Instead of turning her phone off on the thread, she opens Ali’s contact. The photo set under her name is one of the two of them from about a thousand years ago. Both their faces are puffy, their eyebrows ill shaped and their eyes laden in mascara. They’re wearing terrible outfits, but their arms are looped around one another in reckless abandon. They look happy in an untamed kind of way, Ali was five hours off officially dating Ashlyn, Christen’s engagement ring was in the process of being purchased, though she hadn’t known it yet. Christen switches the picture out for one of them from nine months ago, a rare one where they’re both smiling genuinely, Christen’s head tipped against Ali’s shoulder. They look older, wiser. Christen decides she likes them like that.

Ali’s number only rings once before she picks up, the second trill hardly having time to get out its first note before Ali throws out an impatient “Christen?” 

“Hey, Al.” She says, settling back into her seat. There's pink and orange framing the bottom edges of the sky, peeking out from behind a cluster of trees. The sunset is going to be quite spectacular. It settles something deep inside her. 

“Chris, hey, oh my god, whats up?” Ali sounds desperate in her enthusiasm, and Christen reminds herself to keep her better updated. 

“Do you remember when Tobin and I got divorced?” Christen asks, subdued. 

The line is silent for a moment, cut only by the sound of Ali breathing. “Is this a trick question?” 

“No, just-” Christen clears her throat. “We never really talked about it, and I was wondering if I could tell you what happened?” 

“ _ Yes _ . Yeah. Of course, Christen. You can tell me anything.” Ali says, all in a rush. So she does. 

Christen tells her about the spiralling too muchness. About how Christen was so lonely back then, how she punished Tobin for it all the time. How she was on the edge of losing her job because she never seemed to be able to win cases she didn’t care about. How the student debt was piling up above her head on and on and on and everything had felt so colossally and unchangeably out of her control. Tells her about the way she convinced herself she was all alone in the feeling, and in doing so, made sure of it. How she strung up her own wire and resented having to walk on it. 

She waxes poetic about how Tobin had been so ambitious and brilliant, so glorious, enough that the whole world had seen it, and Christen had felt herself dim by her side. The way they’d felt so out of step once being in love was expected to transport into being together, growing together, fighting together. Christen forever jumping down the road, eager to control what she could, while Tobin trailed behind, stopping to smell the roses, but never offering Christen any. The mountain that became a molehill and the ant that became a giant. The way Christen had spooked and run and Tobin had frozen in place. 

  
  


Tells Ali about the girl in some photo on twitter she’d managed to convince herself to accuse Tobin of sleeping with. About how Tobin had looked so upset but had taken the bait, thrown the most harmful thing she could back. How Christen wished she’d never said it just as much as she wishes Tobin had risen above it. The way they’d argued, and the police lights had robbed some of the love in their eyes. It had lived on, festering under the surface, something to be treasured and retold in parables and cautionary tales. Something she’s cured and reimagined. How Christen held Tobin up to the pedestal she was on and was shocked to discover that one of her eyes was a little more closed, her teeth weren’t always brushed, and she didn’t have the right thing to say at the right time.

Christen forgives old Tobin for not being the person Christen expected her to be, the one she never promised existed. She isn’t sure how new Tobin feels about old Christen. If she had to guess, she’d say similarly. She’ll ask soon.

She tells her everything Tobin knows as intimately as she does. Talks about the things that would be of no use in saying to Tobin. She lived and died with Christen in that apartment. Scraped herself off the highway Christen took off down, put herself back together, just the same as her. There's no use trying to press her back into the asphalt, trying to run her over and drench her in fuel to remind her of the way she’d felt back then. No use trying to maim one another with the past. 

Christen loves a lot of things about Tobin, new and old and every version in between. The Tobin in college before they met, the Tobin in mid July of year two when she’d cut her hair, the Tobin in year nine right before the end who still wore socks to sleep, the Tobin who took Christen to the hospital and could fill in every line except how Christen was feeling, the Tobin who cried, the Tobin who came back, the Tobin who kissed her too soon and the Tobin that waited to say the ‘I love you’ on her tongue, the Tobin to be and that never will be. Christen doesn’t hold her to a single version, but she loves each and every person she’s known Tobin to be. 

She loves that Tobin talks slowly. She loves that Tobin changes the subject without even realising it. She loves that Tobin pauses the TV she’s watching or the video game she's playing when Christen starts to speak. She loves that Tobin makes her Dad’s soup. She loves that Tobin loves her friends like family and always has a kind word and special moment for the people that look to her. She loves that Tobin came to LA, she loves that she’s content to be here. She loves that she’s kind, and loves that when she says she’s sorry she means it. Loves that her smile is so big and sometimes she trips over her words. Loves the things that annoy her and the things that don’t. 

Tobin is in the beat of her heart and the flow of her blood for as long as Christen lets her be. She is the grounding point, the shelter in the storm they create together. All consuming, blinding and bright, perfect and corrupt. Christen is content to let her stay right where she is, even as she walks away from the door she’s been clawing at all this time, heading straight for the one across the way, promising a new set of stairs but the same destination in the end. Like with the road, she finds she’s climbed plenty of them without realising. She lets the other door seal shut. 

She tells Ali about the end. She tells her Dad about this beginning. She tells herself to hold hope, not expectation for the future. 

When Christen’s done, Ali exhales loudly. “Fuck.” 

Christen laughs. The sky only has slivers of orange left, the sun almost totally gone, the inky blue taking back over. “Something like that.” 

“And she’s back?” Ali asks, Christen hums an affirmative.

The sun disappears below the horizon. The moon takes its place high in the sky. The sun will arrive with all it’s colour tomorrow. It’s good. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come chat at softnoirr or tumblr.


	10. The reasons our marriage might work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage  
> might work..."   
> \- Matthew Olzman, Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it, folks, that's all she wrote. (Beside the epilogue I'll likely write at some stage) 
> 
> I highly recommend reading the poem from which this chapters title comes, it's one of my favourite pieces ever written on love and heavily informs everything I will ever write on the subject. 
> 
> Thank you all for making writing this so lovely and enjoyable xx

It goes like this; Christen watches six sunsets. She texts Ali back and forth. She emails work her two-week notice. She gets an interview with the not for profit specialising in environmental reform. She texts Tobin a screenshot of the email. Tobin responds with a billion exclamation points and an ‘I’m so proud of you, Chris.’ She smiles at her phone and sends back a ‘me too.’ She means it. For once, she really does. She means it when she writes ‘I love you’ across a page of her notebook too. She means a lot of things, she’s starting to say them. 

She wakes at the crack of dawn to watch three sunrises. She calls Tobin to ask her about her plans for the day as the sky starts turning blue each time. 

The relaxed calmness of being loved in questions has been sorely missed. So she asks Tobin what she’s doing, and Tobin responds with how she’s feeling and the fact that she’d burnt her toast. In turn, Tobin asks how she feels about the interview and what she’s planning to eat for dinner. She whistles her approval when Christen describes the pasta bake she’s been eyeing in her recipe book in graphic detail. 

It feels a little like being 18 again. Trying to keep her cool around the pretty girl who’d talked far too highly of her beer pong abilities but could not have understated the smoothness of her following line more. Desperately hoping no one could see how quickly she was falling, the blush of her cheeks, the flip in her stomach. At the same time wanting everyone to see, to be seen where before she had been acknowledged. She doesn’t think to hide it this time. Tobin knows the depth of her feelings. They’ve both drowned in that lake a thousand times, they’ll do it a thousand more. No need for lifeguards when you’re happy to split the liferaft. 

The sharpness of her cut, the tenderness of the wounds is not something Christen fears. She trusts herself with Tobin. She trusts herself with her own heart. 

She feels 18 on the third morning as she asks Tobin “Do you want to go on a date with me sometime?”

She feels 18 as she draws patterns on the table in front of her, the sky turning blue above the orange. She feels 18 when Tobin’s end of the line goes quiet. Something in her mind says ‘too much’, something stronger in her heart tells her to calm down. This is Tobin. She’s in safe hands.

“Yeah, Chris. I’d love to” Tobin says, eventually. Christen hears the ‘I love you’ she doesn’t bother to hide in her tone. She ends the calls with ‘See you soon’ and she can hear Tobin’s smile when she says her goodbyes.

When Tobin hangs up she makes herself a coffee and lets herself breathe for a moment. The wind is barely a breeze. Air pumped to her lungs subsiding with each movement of her chest and returning when she wills it. She’s surprised, in a distant sort of way, to find she breathes easier when she thinks about it less. She thinks about Tobin without the colour of fear, thinks about her Dad with a colour of affection, thinks of herself with warmth. 

The sky swirls up its pink and oranges and Christen gets swept along with it, the urge to grab wrists and stop the movement long gone. Let icecream be soup and the sky be its own forecast. She is content to follow along without urgency. Maybe there was something to Tobin and her roses all along. Christen buys herself a bunch of red and yellow roses, a few purple hyacinths littered in for good measure, and sets them in the nicest vase she can find, she thinks it was a wedding present, on her countertop. The past merging the present. The lines of time blurry, soft around the edges. Christen likes to think she is too.

She goes to the supermarket on a Monday without a list or the guidance of her budget app. It's a strange thing to pump your fist in victory for, but Christen grins her way through the trip, anyway, buys herself a bottle of wine and a four-pack of the beer Tobin likes from the bottle shop next door and sends Megan a picture of her cart. Megan responds with a selfie of her and Sue giving a thumbs up, Sue looking as if she’s just been torn from something important and Megan smiling as widely as she can. It makes Christen laugh to herself. The teenager scanning her items shoots her a look but Christen only smiles back. 

When she’s vacuuming the guest room that night she takes a half a second to smile at the big blue painting with ‘T.H’ in the corner. It still looks like the sea, even though she vaguely remembers Tobin telling her at the time it was meant to be a rollercoaster. Christen has no idea how it could ever possibly be construed as that, it feels mellow and easy, created in the time between distraction and disappointment. She pulls it off its hook and hangs it in the living room. 

LA feels different. The whole world feels different. Like someone should climb to the very top point and yell out ‘Christen Press has got her shit together for the first time in half a decade!’ It feels awesome, in a word. Things had been one fine line for so long, a grey cloud that followed her and coloured her skin, keeping her lips edging on blue and her kiss carefully on the wrong side of frigid. The world continued, that was it’s most central truth. It kept spinning and spinning without regard for your dizziness or the requests to let you off. You got used to the tug of gravity keeping you in your seat and worried what stopping could mean. There wasn’t an endpoint, it just kept moving. 

Then, Tobin kissed her, and it stopped, and, miraculously, unsurprisingly, expectedly and undeniably, they’d survived. Everything had crawled to its finish line, crossed out its sequels and frozen solid, and she’d been fine. The things which had been completely impossible were another task on another list of things to get done. Crossed all the way through without a thought. 

The world stopped moving for Tobin, and Christen put it back on its wheels for her, too. She loves her, and in that there is sunlight. In that, the storm clouds are gone and the forecast cleared. Her therapist, who she’s paying far too much to give her half the insight her Dad does without an offer of an all-expenses-paid breakfast, insists that Christen has made significant progress. There's a thread loose on her jacket and Christen stares at it their whole session, as she outlines in detail her fears and the fluttery feeling of youth in her stomach that feels a lot like no strings attached happiness. 

It goes like this; Christen loves Tobin, in storms and out of them, primally and consciously. Christen watches the sunset until the door that leads to their apartment in Portland is sealed and watches the sunrise until the door across the hall that Tobin edges around the frame of, soup and smiles in hand, promises of little acts and big feelings, starts to slip open, slivers of warm light slipping through the crack at the bottom. 

She feels like a kid listening in on her parents' conversations through a bedroom door. The thrill of being caught sending shivers up her spine, Channing and Tyler spying over her shoulder. Back then, the actual interest in whatever their parents had been discussing was far outweighed by the thrill of doing something they weren’t really supposed to. Knowing words and sentences that didn’t quite compute, but weren’t for them and were therefore the most interesting string of words the English language had ever devised. The forever warring conflict of risk versus reward. 

Now, she thinks she’d hear any word spoken from behind the hesitation of this door and treasure it. No matter how dull or incomprehensible. Not for its risk but for the warmth and kindness it aspires in her heart. She likes this doorway. She has great hopes for the room they’ll build beyond it. 

They’re busy, the new world is a construction project, with contractors to manage and workers to pay. Tobin packing up over a decade of her life with a ball at her feet and a stadium at her back. Christen constructing the framework for the rebuilding of something she’d long since given up on. They make good on the promise of a date and all its implied promise anyway. Tobin works at finding a movie time that works for them both with such focus it feels sacred. All of it feels sacred. 

This act of doing her hair, shrugging on her nicest jacket. Of Tobin knocking on her door and revealing herself to be wearing her nicest jeans, a necklace draped over her shirt. Of the smiles they cut each other in the car on the drive. Christen feels like a schoolgirl and an old wife and a partner in every respect of the word. Theirs is the chapel of cheap paper cups filled with diet soft drinks and digital movie tickets printed for the keepsake. 

“I’m paying for the popcorn.” Tobin says, emphatically, in the lobby of the cinema. The carpet needs to be vacuumed badly and the air smells more like oil than oxygen, but Christen can’t bring herself to care. She sighs, but zips her purse back up anyway, a smile toying at her mouth. Tobin seems pleased, smiling widely as she steps up to the counter.

She buys a frankly too large container of popcorn, two drinks, and a packet of peanut M&M’s, grinning and making easy conversation with the girl behind the counter all the while. Christen thinks the girl might already be halfway in love with Tobin by the time she’s finished paying, and she’s surprised to find she doesn’t mind. Just watches on in amusement as the kid gives her starry eyes and Tobin says  _ ‘oh, I like the hair’ _ , gesturing vaguely at the bright blue streaks running through her bob. She can hardly blame either of them. Tobin is absurdly easy to love, Christen’s been to hell and back with her and she still loves like a summer day. The girl has cool hair. It’s a win-win. 

Christen smiles watching them. She thinks some past version of herself is sitting on her shoulder, whispering proudly in her ear. 

It’s been a long time since the prickle of insecurity was nowhere to be seen. She had worn it through the divorce and through every attempt at a relationship she’d scrounged up since. It feels like a distant memory, now, though. Something long since lost to the sands of times. Christen can’t fathom anything but assurance around Tobin and her steady eye. 

Tobin elbows her affectionately as they walk toward the showing room, both hands full with their drinks and her phone while Christen carries the popcorn, occasionally tossing a piece into Tobin’s mouth. She catches every single one. The M&Ms are shoved into Tobin’s back pocket despite Christen’s initial protests. Tobin quirks an eyebrow as she says “You good, Chris?” 

She looks at Tobin’s overflowing hands and thinks; I love you. What she says is, “Amazing.”

Tobin grins at her all starry-eyed like she knows the phrase beneath it. “You look nice.”

“You too.” Christen says. Tobin always looks nice, all expansive muscle and easy swagger. She could have been a model, in another life. Or a rockstar. Christen would be happy to watch on in awe of her in any lifetime, so long as they got to sit in the quiet together too. 

“I feel like we’re kids again. Is that crazy?” Tobin asks. head angled just slightly to watch Christen as they walk. The whole corridor is lit with movie posters and stained seating areas. Bored teenagers doing their best to clean up the absurd amount of popcorn littered across the floor before it gets ground into the carpet by unaware children and uncaring adults.

“I feel like I’m in _‘17 Again.’_ Like, the world is making me relive the past in the present so I stop taking things for granted.” Christen says, nose scrunched a little as she considers it. “Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, Chris. I get it.” Tobin smiles softly, gazing at her through loose strands of hair with so much love Christen doesn’t know what to do with it all. Christen doesn’t doubt that she does. 

Doesn’t doubt much when Tobin’s body is angled over to look at her when they take their seats in the cinema. Can’t consider anything but certainty when Tobin exchanges M&Ms for answers to first date questions about Christen, some of which she certainly knows the answers to, some of which time has changed the response on.

She thinks they were made to understand each other. 

Their fingers graze over the popcorn halfway through the movie, and Christen blushes. They both stifle their giggles over the absurdity of the situation. A woman a row ahead of them shushes them and Tobin offers her a smile while Christen falls dead silent. Tobin glances at her and she’s laughing again in a second, head buried in Tobin’s shoulder to hide it. They were married, once. They were separated, once. They had long passed giddiness over touching hands. Christen’s stomach flips anyway, regardless of the world and the contextual clues that perhaps it shouldn’t.

Tobin becomes the presence in her life she can never deny, the long, bone-deep ache of missing her in everything eased off her body, a crushing weight removed, her touch a resetting of broken bones. Now, when she sees a deflated soccer ball on a roof, she texts a photo of it to Tobin with the accompanying ‘this you?’ to warrant the response of ‘funny.’ Now, when she gets herself coffee on the way home, she buys Tobin a latte as well. Now, when she goes to the supermarket she brings home Tobin’s toothpaste and a chocolate bar to keep in the cupboard for the next time Tobin comes over complaining of needing something sweet right then immediately.

It isn’t like before. The intent is clear. Tobin said she was trying. Christen pours the energy back into it. Tobin teases that she’s ‘courting’ her, Christen just shrugs with a smile. They settle down onto the couch to watch Friends.

She can see every bit of the past as surely as she lives every second of the present. The persistence of Tobin, the warmth in her chest, the completeness of the job interview that goes perfectly, and the photo of Tobin’s latest painting full of the same purple of the dress Christen wore waiting on her phone when she leaves fills the corners and crevices of her life. Uncontained and full. 

She gets the not for profit job. They seem a little flabbergasted she wants it, fancy degree and good salary package at her firm pointing to a polite decline instead of an eager  _ ‘thank you so much.’ _ It means a pay cut and a smaller office, but it means a step on the stone of purpose, and Christen wouldn’t take workplace bitching and glass walls over that for the world. 

It also means clearing out her desk in the office she shares with Jesse. A strange Thursday in mid-September which leads her to the office she’d dropped her soul in favour of five years previous. She walks in with it back intact. She repents for nothing. She regrets nothing. There is a necessity to evil and there is love to continuation. Both have suspended her, both have sent her running. Both have led her to the boxes by the edge of the desk as Jesse swirls in her chair across from her, clicking her pen and making no attempt to pretend to be working.

“You look different.” Jesse says, nodding at Christen, chewing her lip. Christen places her stapler into the box delicately, following it with the roll of sticky tape and overflowing pencil case, it’s stitching coming undone at the seams under the weight of it. 

She works her jaw a little. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like. I don’t know. Glowy.” Jesse squints at her, waving vaguely. She almost looks displeased by the idea of it. It makes Christen’s lips twitch a little. Jesse isn’t a bad person by any means. She just doesn’t know Christen. In all these years, Christen has barely known herself, how could anybody else be expected to. If she ever needed a character witness, Jesse, who has seen her most intimately by a margin in a breakdown, with the next closest moment being Christen’s guarded frontier at a soccer game, would be her very last call. “Are you in love or something?”

It’s said teasingly, and Christen has it at 60/40 odds of being a joke to ease the tension, but it’s true, and Christen’s lied to Jesse enough for a lifetime. Lied to everyone and herself enough. Christen has never been so in love as she is now. Even when she loved Tobin so all consumingly before. Isn’t surprised in the slightest that Jesse can see it written all over her. It glows out of her pores and peace settles in her veins, once shaking hands finally still on their grip of the world. 

“Yes. I am.” She says, gently. Watches out of the corner of her eye as Jesse’s jaw slackens and eyes light with the fire of gossip and details others may not be privy to. The look she gets when the final incriminating fact is put on file. 

“So it was that Tobin chick?” Jesse asks, eyebrows jumping. Christen hums her affirmative, leafing through the documents on her desk, trying to divide them in to destroy and distribute piles. “So what, is she your girlfriend?” 

Which is not quite the word for it. Tobin is a game of word association that leads back to the same point every time. She is memory and expectation. Ink drying on paper and set in under skin. She’s the person Christen promised to love and treasure for as long as they both shall live. The person she let down on that front, the person she’s reaffirming promises to with a greater understanding of what they mean. She’s her wife and her ex and her best friend and the only person Christen trusts to hold the pieces of her that will most easily break. She’s her person. 

She doubts Jesse would get that. Doubts she’d even try. It is an experience that is perhaps entirely unique to them in both its rarity and its commonality. Christen doesn’t know if she believes in soulmates, but she knows she’ll go home and Tobin will likely be there, painting with half attention, leaning back on her palms to ask Christen about her day. Knows that there is something cosmically correct in that. 

“She’s Tobin.” Christen shrugs, instead, tapping the paper against the desk to line it up properly before placing it in her box. Jesse makes a humpf sound that Christen doesn’t bother to pay much attention to. 

“And you’re Christen?” Jesse asks. Christen thinks it's probably meant to be a little bit snide. Her tone was not dissimilar to the one she uses on almost-certainly-not sleeping-with-their-boss Tara. She doesn’t care, though. Chooses to see it as a genuine question. It certainly isn't, but she figures Jesse can stay where she is all she likes, as long as Christen can head to her own level. 

Christen drops the photo of her with her Mum from Christmas into her box and clears her throat, looking Jesse dead in her eyes. “Yes.” 

Jesse blinks at her. Christen smiles. 

“Tara isn’t sleeping with Darren, by the way,” Christen says, largely afterthought but still firm. “You should stop telling people that. They’re good people. They deserve better.” 

Jesse swallows, throat working. She looks a little like she’s been slapped, a little like she might actually take it to heart. Christen feels her spine grow a little. She smiles at Jesse as kindly as she can as she picks up her boxes, taking one last glance at her sparse desk. Christen waves herself out the door. She smiles the whole way home. She doesn’t look back once. 

The world is a settling place. She goes to dinner with Tobin on a Sunday and watches her over her wine glass, not hesitating to watch her. The knife she holds propped above both their backs is in no danger of slipping. 

She goes to the supermarket on a Monday without a list or the guidance of her budget app. It's a strange thing to pump your fist in victory for, but Christen grins her way through the trip, anyway, buys herself a bottle of wine and a four-pack of the beer Tobin likes just to have in the fridge from the bottle shop next door and sends Megan a picture of her cart. Megan responds with a selfie of her and Sue giving the screen a thumbs up, Sue looking as if she’s just been torn from something important and Megan is smiling as widely as she can. It makes Christen laugh to herself. The teenager scanning her items shoots her a look but Christen only smiles back. 

When Christen thinks about Tobin, she thinks about bone-rattling passion, soothing words, and lightbulbs. She thinks about a year ago, the person she was, the person she had intended to be warring with the one she needed to become, each slash of their swords tearing another part of her inside apart. She thinks about the photo on her desk with her Mother, that Christmas right after the end. She thinks of her concern, thinks of how happy she would be to see Tobin back where she belongs. 

She loves her and she hopes for her and so she calls and asks her to come over to talk. Christen has spoken so much more in the past few weeks then she has in the past four years that she feels as if her throat will never properly recover. As if there’s a never-ending string wrapped around her tonsils, only beginning to unravel as she tugs at it now, realising how strange it had felt before as it loosens, chokes on the panic of the realisation of it as it alleviates the pain it had been cutting into her without comment all this time. She doesn’t care, she really doesn’t. She just wants to see Tobin. 

Seven years ago, when Christen had been young and had watched Tobin across rooms like she’d hung the moon by hand, and Tobin had looked back with the promise that she’d done it in her name, Tobin’s Mum had looked at them fondly over a dining table and described them as ‘golden.’ Christen thinks, for all the destruction and violent despair that was to follow, there had been merit in it as a descriptor for them. Every part of the other one touched spread pure gold beneath the burning press, seeping into their bloodstream, scratched and tarnished with the lightest of touch. Treasured and coveted and ultimately inflated by the market. 

That they had once been statured versions of themselves in an effort to memorialise a lover still breathing is one of the great mysteries of Christen’s life. To allow oneself to be cremated in a fit of love, buried in roses and draped in gifted diamonds, shovel of dirt after shovel of dirt hitting your chest, seeping into your lungs and mouth, smothering you. Buried alive in your attempts to be immortal. A peek of Tobin’s face staring up at her as she was buried and staring down at her as she tossed another pile of dirt onto Christen’s heart. Golden in its glow. 

Christen doesn’t know who she was then to watch it happen with ease, to ask no questions, to not scrape the inside of her coffin raw. All she knows is that Tobin then is not Tobin now. That the raw gold is gone, replaced by stainless steel, resounding, and firm. The surface on which most gold is plated. 

Tobin is the sunlight, and she smiles like a slow to come epiphany when Christen opens the front door for her. 

She makes them tea, Tobin lent against the kitchen counter while she fills the kettle, sets out the mugs, and waits. There's a half-empty box of earl grey, abandoned after Christen had made a London Fog cake she had been the only one around to eat and had gone off on the taste, along with two tins of herbal berry connotations and English Breakfast. Tobin taps the lid of the English Breakfast twice, and Christen puts a bag in her cup, a herbal one in hers. 

There's light through the windows, bathing the kitchen in a warm glow that streams through Tobin’s hair like a sheer curtain. Wisteria falling about them and opening against the light. The room is as clean as it ever is, but the chemical smell so often clinging to everything Christen owns, the things bleached and purged to be kept in order, is almost indistinct. Instead, the room smells like the roses she’d bought herself and a second chance. 

Tobin’s got a snapback tipped forward on her head. Christen thinks it's one she’s had since college, one she’d almost certainly stolen about a thousand times and mocked her for a million more. She misses the press of the hat against her head. Too tight and clearly not made for her, fitting into the pockets of someone else; the ones they don’t even realise existed. 

She passes Tobin her tea once the water is boiled and Tobin thanks her quietly, her smile burning bright across her face even as she’s serene. Christen aches with the energy and adrenaline of loving her. Wants to tug her forward and squeeze her with all the strength she can muster. Thinks she could run a marathon on the feeling of Tobin alone. 

Love is almost certainly a kitchen. She thinks about porridge in the morning and steam catching light. She thinks about dancing in the numbers of the microwave at 19 and knowing the exact second Tobin took out the popcorn at 26. She thinks about doing the ditches in relative silence and complaining in rattling noise as you burnt the chicken because the love of your life wrapped their arms around yours to bring you some semblance of peace after a day that was like any other, only a fraction louder; headphones turned up one dot at a time until it was damaging. 

She thinks about making Tobin tea and hoping it fills her lungs and settles her stomach the way it does for Christen. Of needing her to be good and happy and full in this life. Thinks about loving in gesture and the peace that has settled in her spine since she realised that too much was just a tether to nothingness. Thinks and acts and smiles as she sits at the table across from Tobin.

“I like your hat.” She says, nodding at Tobin’s head like she’d need directions to it. Tobin grins at her, a little nervous, but still as kind as it always is.

“I like yours.” she says. Christen isn’t wearing a hat. She doesn’t even really own one. Christen has absolutely no hat around to be commented upon. Tobin winces, Christen tries not to laugh. 

“Tobes, it’s me,” Christen says, fingers splayed out in the space between them on the table. Tobin keeps her eyes glued to her hand. “Relax.” 

Tobin clears her throat, straightens her back, keeps her eyes on Christen’s hand but doesn’t reach to take it. “Is this talk going to be an ‘I don’t ever want to see you again’ kinda deal? Because I’m not sure I’m emotionally prepared for you to do that with a smile, Chris.” 

“Tobin, there is literally no world where I am anything but completely miserable if I don’t get to be around you.” Christen sighs. “It’s a ‘let’s go forward’ kind of talk, I promise.” 

She goes to retract her hand, but Tobin shoots her own out, hovering about it. Christen freezes, fingers making a groan of complaint against the polished stone of the table. The air between her hand and Tobin’s feels tense with electricity, any wrong move sparking a wildfire or short-circuiting everything. Tobin lets her hand, slowly, with agonising control, cover Christen’s and squeezes. It leaves a handprint burnt into her flesh and Christen would never have another's fingerprints in her DNA but Tobins. 

She’s missed feeling her reciprocate the touch in her bloodstream. Missed having a heartbeat rest up against her pulse point. Tobin doesn’t look up to meet her eye. Both their palms are sweating and the room feels too large and dinging, the neighbours' dog barking, the fridge buzzing in the background. There’s nothing exactly correct about it, except how right it feels to have Tobin’s touch and know its intent. To have her and hold her and feel no fear but that born exclusively of the thrill. 

“I’m sorry about what happened. I don’t know if I’ve said that yet.” Christen says. Tobin nods, eyes still down. “And, I think it’s probably better if we stop saying it, stop living in the guilt of it, but I don’t want to keep living in it. But I mean it.” 

“What do you want, Chris?” Tobin sighs, tugging her hat up with her free hand to allow enough space for her to run a hand through her hair. She looks tired. She looks like maybe the past happened for her in almost the same way it happened for Christen. She looks like the person Christen loves in every tense, past, present, future, despite every change that's been and gone and everything yet to come. 

Christen rocks back in her chair a little. For the first time in a long time, sitting at a table next to Tobin, it doesn’t feel like the glass will break and the hinges of the door will snap at any moment. Her chest still knows she’s cried, her throat still knows she’s yelled, but she feels as though she’s emerged from a shelter to discover that the storm wasn’t so bad. That the foundation was still there, the prized possessions she’d almost gotten herself killed trying to protect remained unscathed all on their own. 

Some things are gone, but she doesn’t miss them any more than she misses the hair tie she lost last week or the pair of socks that were covered in holes anyway. Doesn’t miss them the way she has missed Tobin all this time.

What she wants is to go back to the start and tell herself to slow down, to stop seeking endings that were yet to be written. Maybe they still would have blown up. Maybe the flood still would have come and torn down the walls and stained the carpet. At least she would have the luxury of surprise, instead of numb expectation. The world was not so doomed as she’d thought it when she’d sat down to jot down her survival plan at 21. It couldn’t be. She’s sitting at a table with Tobin, she’s still here, they’d ruined it and ruined it and they’d survived. No world so doomed could allow her something so precious. 

She wants to go to the grocery store. She wants to hear Tobin snort before making a stupid joke about a label on a jar of pasta sauce. Wants to roll her eyes but laugh because she couldn’t quite help it, because even when Tobin was idiotic, she was the funniest person Christen knew, she was the most everything. She wants Tobin to wrap an arm around her waist and mumble ‘but you love me’ against her shoulder, she wants to agree without hesitation. 

She wants to see Cindy and Jeff every holiday. Wants to bring Tobin with her to her family events as a matter of expectation. Wants to still ask each time and be teased for it with an ‘obviously, Chris.’ Wants to talk out every problem. Buy a house when they want to, go to sleep when they want to, get the jobs they want, and quit them when they don’t want them anymore. Have bad days and eat on the couch and complain to each other. Wants them not on a schedule but a wavelength, seeing what happens side by side. 

Love isn’t grand moments, its grand feelings in the little ones. It’s knowing that she can survive without Tobin just as well as she knows she never needs to test the theory again. She could be without Tobin, now. She doesn’t need her. It would ache, the bandage peeled off a few weeks too soon, and she’d have to work through it, but she would be, eventually, good. With Tobin, they can have warmth in their chest until their 92 and tell each other dumb jokes just to pass the time, just to see the other laugh. Even if all they’re doing is swimming in a pool at midnight, because Christen wants to recreate a moment of her childhood and Tobin thinks it’s ‘vibey.’ She wants to take her to a movie and get nervous when their hands brush, because it's the first time, even if they’ve done it a million times over. She wants that. 

She loves her, and she defines everything hereafter in Tobin, Tobin, Tobin. Come what may. For better or worse she’ll always be better with Tobin. 

“Everything.” She breathes. “Anything. You. Us. A chance to stay.” 

It's a breathless truth, Christen hasn’t wanted anything the way she wants all the things she’s lost and all the things she knows she can create from the ashes. Wants Tobin even if she doesn’t want her back this way. Even if it's hard. She’s not ashamed, for once, to say it. Shame has no place left to torment her, her eyes nothing left to drown her with. 

Tobin looks at her, raw, exposed in the midday light of Christen’s kitchen. Christen turns her hand in Tobin’s grip to run her thumb over the back of her hand. Savouring the touch like an alter. The long-faded hometown you remembered with a child's eyes but look at with the same affection, unheeded by youth, flaws and all, as an adult. Running her hands along the windowsill of her childhood home, cleaning the window, remembering things that happened only once as a long-held ritual. A place to always return, under every gaze, and every indiscretion. 

“What do you want?” Christen asks. There are a thousand possible answers. Her heart preens at some and cowers from others. She wants an absolution befitting her love, but she wants Tobin to be happy in a way she’s never recognised in herself before, and so she lifts her chin to the answer without fear. 

Tobin blinks at her. “I want to know what kind of light bulbs to buy you.” 

Christen opens her mouth to respond and shuts it again. In the drafts of this conversation in her head, she had never quite considered Tobin’s interests being vested in her light fixtures. She has to check for herself every single time she buys them, so she isn’t sure why Tobin feels the information is so pivotal. Or why she’s become the resident purchaser of light bulbs. Also, honestly: What? 

Tobin scrunches up her nose, head tilting to the side, rubbing at her eyebrow. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for like, five years, and I’m talking about light bulbs.” 

Christen squeezes her hand lightly, as amused as she is confused. She remembers conversations like this when they were first sort-of dating. When there were no labels and it was the future that spread before them that held expectations and caused hesitance, rather than the past. They’d never really learned to talk about the way they felt beyond Tobin’s eventual ‘I love you, if that's chill’ and Christens ‘I love you too, so that’s, you know, chill.’ Light bulbs are progress from that. 

“When you needed your light changed, and I bought like half the store.” Tobin waits for the recognition and understanding to dawn in Christen’s eyes before she continues. “And the whole time I was like, standing in this aisle, and then sitting next to you, and it was great, it felt like you wanted me there, and that's all I wanted. But I just kept thinking, I can’t believe we’re in this world where I don’t know what light bulbs you need. A world where I can’t even ask because it’s meant to be a gesture instead of something that  _ obviously _ I do for you. I can’t believe I ever let there be a my light bulbs and a your light bulbs. They should be our light bulbs. Does that make sense?” 

She knows exactly what she means, and it makes Christen’s throat feel tight. Makes her want to smash every single light in this house and drag Tobin to the nearest hardware store. Makes her want to hold her close and take the last five years back. They had made a vow of love and light bulbs, and to think it could ever be broken was perhaps one of the strangest things Christen had ever had to come to terms with. 

“I know,” Christen says. “I want that too.” 

“It’s just, like, it's so hard, Chris. It’s been so, so hard to forgive you, and accept that you weren’t going to come back on your own because I hurt you too. To figure everything out, and I want everything with you again, too, but I don’t want to get hurt. I’m so sorry, for everything, I should’ve been better, and I don’t want to hurt you anymore.” Tobin sighs, chest rising and falling in one long, steady breath, shaking her head. At herself or at Christen or the situation she doesn’t know. Perhaps all three at once. Perhaps none of the above. 

“We’re going to hurt each other, Tobes, I think that’s how it works,” Christen says, staring at their entwined hands. “But it hurts more to hold on to everything. To keep poking at the wound so it never heals instead of patching it up and taking it as it comes.” 

“I think I’ve been afraid to leave it alone, you know? Because if we do that I don’t have you anymore. If it doesn’t hurt then there isn’t anything tying me to you.” Tobin says. Christen’s breath is sharp, but it comes. The air still filtered into her lungs despite the sting. “I just want you to mean this. So we can move on.”

Christen uses her free hand to cover her hold on Tobin, clasping the hand that had once worn a wedding ring with her initials carved into it in both of hers. “I mean it. I always mean it. I will always love you. Even if you hate me. Even if you tell me to leave.”

“This is your house, Chris.” Tobin’s smiling, wide and toothy, even as she keeps her face relatively serious.

“Metaphorically, then.” Christen says, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at Tobin’s attempts at easing the tension. 

“Complicated.” she hums, pressing her fingers into Christen’s palm. Her face turns a little stormy, and Christen knows the next blow as it comes, “I don’t ever want you to leave. Ever.” 

“Then I’ll stay.” Christen says, level. It’s not scary anymore. She doesn’t want to go. Tobin wants her to stay. It’s as simple as it should be.

“I get why you left. I’m not mad about it or whatever, to be clear.” Tobin says, clearing her throat. “I was, obviously. Stages of grief and all that. And if you want space, then I can give it to you. I’ll give you anything you need. Just promise to tell me what that is, please?” 

Christen nods without hesitation. “I’ll tell you what I need instead of accusing you of things, and you think before you speak when you’re mad.”

It isn’t bitter. Not a tinge of anger to it. Just clarity. Drenched completely in the understanding of what the first tug on the string had looked like, and why she wanted to avoid the unravelling this time around. Tobin seems to understand it, nodding without question, expression seeming a little drained, but not wincing away from the request. 

The silence between them hangs, Tobin’s hand still pressing up into hers, and Christen’s thumb still rubbing circles on whatever part of her skin she can access. Tobin’s gaze is set on their hands between them. The tether she wanted so badly. Christen knows it’s going to hurt. Knows that there will be moments of fear and doubt and worry and pain that's blinding in the eye of memory. Thing is, it feels weatherable. It feels like watching a storm rolling through the clouds, the air heaving, skin flushing beneath the imminence, and thanking God for the break in a drought. 

“Look, I don’t know what happens now. But I know I love you, and I want this, even if that doesn’t fit the plan. I don’t know how to give up on you, on us, because you’re the only decision I know how to make.” Christen says, breaking the certain silence between them. 

For so long Tobin had been more instinct than choice. More gravitational pull than an expression of free will. To wake up every morning and think ‘of course I’m here where else could I ever go.’ Tobin had been a world on its hinges and Christen had closed the door. Her Dad was right - wasn’t he always - both choices were there, now. Christen can hold Tobin closer, make good on promises, look out for her until her dying day. Can dance in the kitchen and linger in warmly coloured paintings across the hall, or she can haunt them. Leave the room falling into place around them, be nothing but a ghost to Tobin’s possibilities. 

The choice is clear. She’s played phantom and she’s played partner. She’s done with the performance of both. She’s firm and solid where she stands, step by step to get to Tobin, meeting at the midpoint, the touchstone they keep returning to again and again warm from the press of their hands. 

Both choices are there, but Tobin is the only answer to the question that has echoed across her mind every day for half her life. 

Tobin smiles at her with so much love Christen doesn’t know what to do with it except hope the echo chamber reflects it back to her. “You’re everything, Chris.”

Christen smiles, squeezes her hand. She would have run from the sentiment once. For the same reasons she worried when Tobin had gifted her an expensive frame with a picture of the two of them, the impracticality and permanence of something that was so able to collapse. Now, it’s easy. It’s everything. 

“We kind of messed up, huh?” Tobin says. Christen huffs a laugh. They really, really did. “Hope we don’t do it again.” 

“I think we’re different people now.” Christen sighs, wistful for a time before change. When every version of yourself was a certain final form. Every whisper was destined to be a shout. Every love was built to last. 

She has felt so stagnantly afflicted for so long. The world unsteady and ever-changing as she stays fixed to one place, sinking in cement that immortalises her as the lover without her love. She’s not the same Christen she was, she’s someone else entirely. Someone completely different than the person Tobin had first met, someone completely different from the person who had promised her a lifetime she couldn’t even fathom. Christen flickers like a candle and burns like stars. 

“We are.” Tobin agrees, heavy in the space. It feels like peace. “But I love all the yous I’ve known before, and it’s always you, Chris. Even the times when it's not.” 

“Even the me that had bangs?” Christen asks. Tobin grins, eyes bouncing from Christen’s face to the curls she has tied at the back of her head with glee.

“Especially that you,” she says. “It was super Carly Ray Jepsen.”

“I didn’t know you even knew who that was.” Christen doesn’t bother suppressing her eye roll this time, smirking at Tobin, who just looks back in amused ease. 

“That I really, really, really like you song is kind of rad.” She says, shrugging without care. Christen has seen Tobin insist that her music taste was possibly the most dope of anybody on earth. Has seen her tell other people to turn off their music in cars because it was lame. Now she’s seen her freely admit her love for Carly Ray Jepsen. They certainly are different people. Christen has to respect it. 

“Fuck, I’ve missed you so much.” Christen says, surprised to try and suck in a breath and finding a knot in the back of her throat, tears dripping at her eyelashes.

She hasn’t sat at a table in laughter and peace in so long. Hasn’t made fun of Tobin in a way that felt unguarded, talked to her without a weight of unsung words, in so impossibly long. How the damn didn’t break under this insurmountable pressure so very long ago is, was, and remains a mystery Christen will likely never even approach an explanation for. It isn’t a litany of too much. It’s a crescendo of finally, and it brings tears to her eyes and a smile to her face. 

Tobin makes a choked sound of concern, pulling her hands out from Christen’s grip to move around the table. She tugs out a chair with her foot, hands already grabbing at Christen, one pressed against the base of her skull, one falling to her knee as she plops herself down. Christen laughs on her tears, pushing her head back into the touch happily. 

“You good?” Tobin mumbles, thumbing her skull easily. They’ve been in this position so many times before it feels like coming home. A return to childhood. A return to the places she was always meant to be before she decided she knew the road better. 

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Christen admits, wiping at her eyes. 

“We’ve been so stupid, Chris.” Tobin whispers, almost conspiratorially, eyes wide for effect and lips stretching in a smile. Christen laughs, choking past the sob that’s built up in her throat. Her tears are splashing onto Tobin’s face, but Tobin just grips the back of her head tighter, drawing their forehead impossibly closer together, like she’s afraid Christen might run off at any moment. They’re going to have to work on that. Christen isn’t going anywhere ever again. 

“I’m so sorry,” Christen says, leaning into the brush of Tobin’s thumb against her jaw, clenching her own hands around her elbows. 

“Me too,” Tobin says, eyes earnest. Christen loves her, God, does she love her. “For the sake of clarity, I can kiss you now, right?”

Christen laughs so suddenly she involuntarily breaks their closeness, her head falling back, nose scrunching, Tobin’s hand is still supporting her skull, even as she pouts at her. “Yeah. Whenever you want. Forever.” 

“That's a long time.” Tobin says, but she’s already drawing Christen back in to ghost her lips over her cheek, dragging along the edge of her chin before pressing lightly to her lips. It's chaste. It's no first kiss. No passion-filled haze, no stumbling awkwardness of wild sparks. It spreads warmth across Christen’s chest. It says ‘i love you’ and ‘i trust you’ and ‘stay’ all at once. It has all the baggage, perfectly shared between them, supported by the unmoving weight of them. 

“I think we’ll manage” She mumbles when their lips break apart. Tobin grins at her, and Christen knows she’s the only one that gets this. Understands, deeply, and without reserve, how much it all means. How easily drawn they are to one another. Magnets with free will. 

Tobin nods, and Christen kisses the first body part she can reach, which happens to be her shoulder. “I don’t doubt it.” 

Christen doesn’t either. There are few things she’s doubted less. She knows, somewhere deep within herself, that there is no world where they don’t return to this dining table. No reality where either of them can stroll without regret into the long goodnight by themselves or with anyone but the one across from them. The sun sets as surely as it rises, Christen will take every midnight so long as she can bask in the dawn light. 

She is, by nature, a morning person, but she’ll take the night happily to watch how it colours the sky with light when it fades away. 

When she was younger, she had a perfect vision of the future, a list as long as her forearm of all the things she wanted. A house in the suburbs, perfect job, perfect marriage, a few dogs, a clear path into the happily ever after. The solution to trouble and the clear cut, cookie-cutter love. What she felt for Tobin, what Tobin felt for her, was never born for that life. It was greater than any shape could contain. Like water, it flowed out of the first crack it saw and drenched all around it. In any shape, in any way, in any mold, but without a natural resting place to call its own. It was unfathomable, without colour or shape, and yet defined by its blueness, remembered in waves. There had been no possibility of fitting it into something predetermined. Something created as an arbitrary place holder. They were too far beyond reason, too far out to sea. 

Christen drifts in the waves, confident in having learned to swim, finally. Tobin rests beside her, grounding hand sweeping over her skin. She laughs into the water that makes no attempt to drown her and Tobin’s humour matches it without question. 

  
  


When Christen finds herself in Portland, a city she’d fled with the memory of all her broken plates nicking at the skin of her ankles, a city that echoes Tobin in every billboard and every cobblestone, a city that has ‘HEATH - 17: THANK YOU’ written in the sky, the same name and number are written across Christen’s back, watching as Tobin's team pay tribute to her one last time, she can’t help but smile. The intimidation, the fear in every fibre of being long gone. She’d slept 12 hours when they finally put it all to rest. Holding on draining her far more than the fall she’d feared all this time. 

The city is befitting of Tobin. The glory and fools gold glinting until the final siren. A stadium on its feet when she high fives Lindsey on her way off the field, wrapping the captain's armband around her bicep, as Tobin staggers under the violence of the hug she’s met with. Christen staggers a little when Tobin looks up from the field, eyes scanning the crowd to meet her eyes and grin. 

Christen is not a perfect person. She does not have the solution, she lacks a fair few of the questions. She has dreams that have gone unlived and people in her phone she can’t call anymore. Demons better left alone than soothed. She has a standing therapy appointment on Sunday afternoon, and a standing dinner date with Tobin on Sunday nights. Half her plans live in shreds on the floor. Half of her love letters never gained stamps. She has a gas receipt from a trip out of Portland she can never take back. 

She puts down the whip and leaves her own back alone to heal. Tobin soothes it with the forgiveness of her touch. In exchange, she smoothes the wounds in Tobin’s skin. They are made of scars in the shape of each other, in the shape of the world, in the shape of their families, loved and lost. They are scar tissue and better-made decisions. They are absolution and love in a way that is finally home. 

Christen bursts with pride, the name on her back just where it’s meant to be, even as Tobin lets go of the number. They are, perhaps, for once, perfectly in sync. For one blinding moment that extends beyond every horizon, they are, at last, at peace. The close of one chapter the opening of the next, the close of the door you’ve battered against for years the path to the one that slips open with ease.

If her Dad smiles warmly at them in all their nerves with all their scars when the door to her childhood home swings open on Christmas Day, her sisters shouting in excitement in the living room, winking at Christen as her Dad waves them like this was an inevitability. Well, he’s right, it is. Because there isn't a world where Christen wasn’t meant to be right by Tobin’s side as the two of them figured it out together. 

And if Christen is wearing her engagement ring for the first time in too long the next Christmas, when the door opens to see her in-laws who welcome her with no time in between them, then perhaps that is as it was meant to be all along. 

If Christen goes home to a marital bed she’s grown in and falls asleep with ease, despite Tobin snoring absurdly loudly next to her, Tobin, who will never admit she snores, Tobin, whose hair gets tangled in the zipper of her jacket, Tobin, who changes the light bulb every time it blows with a smile on her face, Tobin, who is in the beat of her heart and the pattern of her step, fear notwithstanding, well, then, she supposes there is nothing to worry about. 

They walk out of the ruins of Rome together and head for higher ground. 

It goes like this: Christen loves Tobin. Tobin loves her. The world is right and good and time is not so certain as it seems. Christen doesn’t get everything she’s ever wanted. But she gets Tobin, and she supposes it’s almost the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come chat: softnoirr on tumblr


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